


The House of Gwyn Carraigh

by stillmadaboutpetra



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, Buried Alive, Claustrophobia, Competent Jaskier | Dandelion, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Freeform, Gen, Gothic, Hallucinations, Haunted Houses, Horror, Hurt Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Hurt/Comfort, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Minor Character Death, Monster of the Week, Mystery, Protective Eskel (The Witcher), Protective Jaskier | Dandelion, Psychological Horror, Spooky, The Horror of the Unknown, Witcher Contracts, Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26876929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: A curious boast of luck sees Eskel into the nowhere town of White Stone, the promise of Geralt and Jaskier's company quickly souring with what he finds: Jaskier, alone and half-mad in a nightmarish torment, and Geralt gone missing on a contract. Trying to keep a cool head, Eskel's window to save both Jaskier and Geralt quickly closes.A tale in two acts.
Relationships: Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Eskel/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 80
Kudos: 203
Collections: Sordid Saovine - The Witcher Halloween Event





	1. Above

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone. I've had this planned for awhile (had to finish Gold Star) and am excited to get to put this up during Spooky Time !!! I really want to try writing into other genres 😛
> 
> All you need to know for reference is they had a threesome once
> 
> read the tags.  
> Thank you Inber for correcting my nonsenses.

* * *

Act I - Above

* * *

  
  
The hunched bodies of farmers rise like dogs, perking to his approach, the dull clop of horse hoof to flat earth a bell toll of strangeness and adventure. Their bent backs crest, spring suddenly, one by one in a slow wave of acknowledgement. One, two, a handful, lift arms in greeting.

Eskel raises his hand back, letting his open palm hover in benediction. It's unclear if they greet him knowing he a Witcher but the welcome entreats him all the same. He repeats the gesture as they repeat themselves, autumn’s harvest land throwing herself in green and gold in rich buttered spread. Until farmland and the finger counts of potatoes narrow to houses of different trade, all blistered and bleached. The sights and smells give from farm to tanner’s lye, to the petty smith’s forge, to the school house as narrow as the old woman who learns it.

“Witcher!”

The people of White Stone spy his swords, grinning in half-full mouths, gray teeth, knowing smiles.

“Witcher!”

“Oy!”

It’s not quite hostility, but Eskel’s had better. He’s had far worse, too. He keeps lifting and dropping his open palm, elbow numbing as he holds his hand aloft.

A man leading his mule back from town slow to bare his whole face to Eskel, squinting into the low set of the sun, crinkled in years, in work.

“Witcher man. White Stone’s already got a Witcher man.”

“Does it?” Well. Shit. S’pose his good instinct to keep ambling along this direction, Dal Blathaan a heathen’s ridge in the distance, wasn’t much but stupidity. His guts been tugging him this way, Scorpion chewing the bit, reigns slack in his hands the past few miles.

“White Wolf. Aye, yeah, White Wolf.” He waves at Eskel as he passes. “Have fun in the dark, Wolf!” He hoots a laugh, going his way, leaving Eskel in the opposite direction and yearning outward. “Crazy Witchers. Awoo-oo! Down doggy! Dig dig dig!”

Eskel brings Scorpion to pause, sitting high on his mount and twisting his head to watch the man carry on in his slow mulish trudge.

Maybe it wasn’t stupidity that brought him this way but homesick longing and the promise of dear companionship. Not a bad deal. The opportunity tugs on him. But the burst of good fortune wavers with each passing face, for half acknowledge him, and that’s twice damned too many more than normal. Hostility rolls slack from them; they greet him in knowing barings of their face, in wary promise.

“Rotteran’s already got ‘imself a Witcher!”

“Come to join the white one, mangle face?”

Any other time, he’d have turned back, but now he does ride to town for that reason, the prospect of Geralt a welcome respite from the Path’s dull loneliness. Even a single night in his company would keep him sound for the months to come, till the space between them shrank to naught.

Funny though. He didn’t see a noticeboard boasting any beast this way.

A braided bicker of girls runs before his horse. The oldest among them, severe-eyed and watchful, pushing along a doddling youngster, turns to face down his approaching horse. She lifts her delicate chin, schools her face flatter than his.

“You come too late, Witcher. Another gone.” Her mouth opens, pink and pale. “Too late.”

She grieves on the words and gathers the kittens of her younger ilk in armfuls, scooting them from their gawking, pressing dull dresses and modest heads forward and out of Eskel’s approaching path.

The girls scatter, shrieking and giggling but mostly shrieking, over a Witcher, over his face, over a man at all.

“Too late! Too late!”

“It ate it ate it ate!”

Eyes pass over him from windows, from thatched roof, from the stone-cobbled alley. All the while, White Stone takes form around him, in lit lanterns and country-hand keepers. In the rare bladed man and the densely built women. All the while, his stomach sinks to think of lying his head here, but the sinking is familiar, and it ever hits the bottom of his gut, forced to endure. Still, his skin ripples, a shiver passing through him as his horse ambles towards the square of town. He shakes his head to dispel the nagging building in his gut. The girls’ crying lingers.

Wolf man wolf man! It ate it ate it ate! Too late too late too late.

A premonition of disaster manifests with the plucking tight noise of lute strings that, even to Eskel’s untrained musical ear, hover in an unnatural interval. The notes topple over and over, a rockslide of sound that gathers in the conch of his ear, that drones and scratches tunelessly. Eskel’s shoulder jumps, a twitch to shake the sound from buzzing and growing like a rot, like corpse flies and crow calls. He scrapes the side of his face onto his shoulder, rubbing his ear, finally clapping a palm against his own skull to dispel the itch.

He rounds the corner of the street, lets his feet guide him into the spilled central circle of the small village where the cardinal roads converge.

Jaskier’s fingers beckon in discordant leaps, crooked and flushed with effort. The bard is bowed over his lute, perched atop the corner of a stone wall that brackets the twice-storied tavern and inn. The wooden declaration of White Stone inn creaks in the breeze, the sign swinging on an iron jut. The rusted sound plays an agonized harmony to his song that, only as he grows ever closer, Eskel begins to hear the lyrics too, caught in the cool wind carving around the buildings.

>   
>  _Oh my summer bride she grows so fair_  
>  _Bathes twice a day weaves flowers to her hair_  
>  _And she dresses herself in white sunshine bright_  
>  _Singing herself slowly into my care_
> 
> _Bare feet she_ _runs into my arms_  
>  _Straining plump on all our secrets_  
>  _My love eternal ripe and warm_  
>  _And everybody knows into my dark she goes_  
>  _My summer bride here to wed her woes_
> 
> _Oh my bride in white my bride so fair_  
>  _Come have my kisses come to my lair_  
>  _Oh my bride so young my bride so new_  
>  _Lost to all the monsters you never slew_  
>  _And everybody knows into my dark she goes_  
>  _My summer bride here to wed her woes_

Pockmarked around the town square, fixed market stands offer small features of the harvest. Bright orange and green gourds and squashes, the dark of fruit, the lush dripping jars of honey. Light flashes in bursts, caught free from the passing clouds, waning with the evening’s slant. The sun slides low behind Eskel, losing itself slowly to the trees, to the distant mountain crests, to the earth itself. Brilliant, dipping, darkening.

At first it seems Jaskier has no audience save a few educated finches, dark-eyed and suspicious of Eskel, red beaks ember flash points. But then he realizes that the inn is quiet, the shutters open, a flock of women lounging over the lip of window frames. Jaskier is never a lonely figure, not even when he pretends to strike one. The queer calls of the populace fade as Eskel closes in on him, drawn surely by his voice, by his smell, by everything he ever is.

Resigned to the inevitable pull of the man, Eskel steps into the radius of his attention, and still does not earn it. Jaskier’s head remains tipped low, and though his face pulls tight with concentration, his eyes remain closed - Eskel can see the ball of his eyes twitching beneath the lids, phantom reading without sight. So he tarries on the edge of acknowledgement, listening as Jaskier damns a summer wedding.

There’s a sad dreamy sigh from over Jaskier’s shoulder, impassioned enough to draw him upright, flirtation corkscrewing the corners of his mouth. His eyes flutter open, red and worn - his face lifts to shock Eskel. Sweat mars his foreline. Bruises hang beneath his eyes. A drunken gloss converges across his blue gaze, washing it thin.

“Oh, dear, oh dear,” Jaskier laughs, kicking his feet at the sight of Eskel. The lute is clutched tighter, dearly and deathly, before Jaskier lays it aside to hop to unsteady feet and slosh his way forward to Eskel. “Oh my dear.”

He greets Eskel simply, with a kiss to each cheek, reeking of booze and sweat beneath his perfumes and powders. He hangs tight to the great shape of the Witcher.

“Jaskier,” Eskel greets, tempered and disappointed. He’s never seen the bard in such a poor state; knew him for his indulgences but by being without an indulgence of his own in his blood, the drunkenness did Jaskier no favors or good opinion. A strand of concern creeps around the Witcher, only restrained by a practical distance to habitual weaknesses.

Jaskier smiles at Eskel, squeezing his arms before releasing him, humming with false merriment for a dizzy moment. Eskel grimaces and holds him by the shoulder, taking a not so subtle sniff at Jaskier’s neckline. His skin crackles with something like magic, a remnant note. Longing hits him quickflash to think the static charge of magick is the same imbuement risen from Geralt’s skin - cellular and cosmic. Jaskier’s humming stretches higher, a laugh swallowed in his throat, and then he’s patting Eskel’s face, drawing him close to stare the Witcher keenly in the eye.

“You need to go, Eskel.”

And then Jaskier turns on his heel, cryptic words spun whirlwind around him, to pick up his lute. He hops back atop his stone wall, some kind of gargoyle fixture, to sing of his White Wolf in a cawing voice.

Eskel spares him a minute’s more mind before turning away towards the stables that he can smell on the far end of the town’s limit, hay and horse and shit. And with a similar premonition, a nagging sensation drawing tension to his body, he comes upon the thatched open stable, humble and unremarkable, only to find the remarkable white-striked face of Geralt’s mare.

Roach tosses her head at the sight of him and Scorpion, long face bobbing over the crossbeams of the stable’s fenced wall.

A man, the owner he presumes, approaches him with mild suspicion, looking at Eskel in dazed confusion.

“Witcher,” the man entreats, lifting a hand to Eskel. He frowns, blinks, makes a contemplative noise. The offered hand flaps down to the man’s side as it goes unattended by either Witcher or general decorum. “I ‘spose you’ll be staying, heh? This is White Stone’s stable, and I its keeper, Osland.”

“That mare,” Eskel says instead of confirming. He tips his head towards Roach. “She and her Witcher been here long?”

“Better end of a week, ‘fraid t’say. Was the white one your uh-?” He makes a knowing gesture at the proud display of Eskel’s medallion.

The simple lisp of tense makes Eskel’s eyes flare wide. “Was?”

Osland, for his part, shakes his head with slow pity. “It’s been days since he took on his quest. Left behind that bard to -,” Osland lifts a hand to his head and makes an encompassing gesture of unraveling. “That boy ain’t right.”

Eskel interrupts the moment with a staying hand, caught between relief and a heavy gut of eminent grief. “He’s not back yet?”

“Aye, aye. Went to find Rotteran’s wife, hunt on what hunted on her. Not that I’m buttin’ my head into that sad business.” Osland shakes his head once more, stepping sideways to Eskel’s horse, hands held up in surrender to the gossip.

“The white one was your-,” and it’s clear that the man means to ask if Geralt is Eskel’s friend, but he trips over the concept of endearment and companionship within the guild of Witchers. Eskel lingers in the parenthetical silence, heavy with it, and makes the decisive decision to press on with stabling his horse and dragging himself back to the inn that keeps Jaskier.

While the stableman treated him with distant civility, and no hostility arises from anyone he passes in the waning light of the evening, Eskel can’t shake the nagging burden of awareness prickling over his skin. He shakes his shoulders loose and swallows several times to ease a swollen tension in his ears before he presses himself into the tavern’s space.

No one greatly reacts to Eskel’s massive form suddenly presuming itself in the entranceway of the room. He steps in fully, closing the wide swinging door nearly upon himself, shuttering himself into the warm and spiced space. The earlier expectation of Jaskier’s bizarre braying fades properly with the sight of the bard in humble glory swaying near the fire, clothes nearly set to a blaze. He’d go up like tinder, like a scarecrow, straw filled and ready to blaze. He is singing to two young girls, ribbons in their hair, socks long and warm beneath their skirts. They are cuddled together on a chair, a tangle of limbs that begin and end in the other. Not twins, no, but nearly, soft-eyed and sleep-sewn. Eskel isn’t sure if he could separate them by sight or smell.

He’s singing a nonsense song of a midnight carriage driven by a pumpkin-headed prince who whisks away girls out past dark. It’s both charming and threatening. By the sighs the girls release, they are finding it just the right side of titillating - a pumpkin head! Oh but he must be a charming fellow.

In a natural pause of the song, where Jaskier is diddling his lute strings and offering too much smile for such young things, for the man needs to preen no matter the audience, one of the sisters latches onto his sleeve, just a pinch of fingers that doesn’t pause his playing.

“The pumpkin man - does he turn into a handsome man?”

“Oh, must he be handsome, my dear?” Jaskier grins wickedly, eyes still glassy with drink, lids a little too heavy.

“He’s a prince.”

“Fwooy! A bit of good blood doesn’t make for a good face. Quite the lesson to learn with nobility.”

The sisters don’t like this. They arrest his hands now, both together, make the lute hang by its strap from his shoulder and wobble on his thigh. Jaskier blinks dazedly as they clutch his hands.

“Sing him handsome, Jaskier.”

“Make him handsome with a kiss.”

“Give the bride a handsome man.”

“Don’t let him be a monster.”

Jaskier stares at them and their chorusing demands. “Who said anything about a monster?”

The sisters exchange looks and release him. They draw their knees to their chins, clasp their arms about themselves. Jaskier leans towards them, intent, frowning.

“Come now, little chicks, what monster awaits girls after dark?”

He clutches his lute, hands trembling, before picking up the plucking ditty as before. In the face of their silence, he hangs his head, and begins the song once more, only a verse longer, before his shoulders sink and he’s up and away, striding across the tavern for another cup of the warm wine mulled and resting in a large crocker. It’s then that he catches sight of Eskel hung and waiting.

“Eskel!” he startles, as if seeing the Witcher for the very first time. The moment outside is gone from him; he splits into an honest smile, diverting his course to draw up to Eskel and kiss him as he had outside, laughing gently at the touch of his lips to Eskel’s stubbled cheek.

“Here, my good master Witcher, take your simple kisses from a humble bard. I hope they satisfy to your heart’s content.” He pats Eskel’s slow beating chest, four quick pats of his hand out of sync with churning anatomy.

“Oh! Tell me you’ve not travelled day and night on poor wearied feet for kisses from me - but do tell me anyway.” Jaskier faints against him in a brief hug before returning himself to his venture for wine, calling over his shoulder. “Bless all the gods, Eskel, am I glad to see you. Bed with me tonight, if you not mind a cuddle. It’s only, I’ve grown so lonely and mad with it.”

Jaskier no sooner has a full cup in his hand than he’s making it half full then nearly empty. Smiling, yes, twinkling so, but the sweat stays across his brow, his eyes do not focus. He’s drunk, horribly so, and wincing around the shape of his own skull.

“He’s a mess,” says the woman behind the counter, leaning forward on her elbows. “Bothers me all day and night with his harping.”

Eskel draws up to her, casting about the room. The people buzz without moving, watch without lifting their eyes. They possess the animate static of the haunted and hunted. Business and civility trudge forward with the narrow precipice of precarious balance. One wrong breath, and the whole town would topple down. Eskel rubs a hand across his scars and tugs on his earlobe to break the seal of pressure gargled up in the drum of his head.

“He came in with the White Wolf, yeah?”

The woman looks at Eskel, then looks down at the dangling medallion on his chest. “Pity him.”

Before Eskel can question that, irritated now by the ominous repetition, Jaskier lopes to his side, gathers Eskel’s elbow betwixt his own, and careens them towards a nice corner that boasts a pitcher and two cups.

“Don’t,” Jaskier whispers between his teeth, patting Eskel’s elbow. “Drink first. For love of all things,” Jaskier plops down heavily and drops his face into his arms, sprawled on the tabletop. “Keep drinking.”

Eskel sits and pours a cup of wine, clove and cinnamon gathering in the lip of the pitcher. “Is Geralt dead?”

Because.

That’s really all that matters.

Jaskier makes a wounded noise before him and lifts his face just enough to meet Eskel’s demanding gaze.

“Not yet,” the bard answers, as cryptic and useless as anyone else has been. Eskel growls, shaking him, quick and flush and humiliated by the ragged burn of his own emotions. Jaskier’s limp and gangles in his hand like a doll.

“Jaskier.”

Jaskier’s head lolls about before he settles with it crooked back, slayed before him. “Tell me, dear Eskel, what brings you here.”

“Ain’t in the mood for our games. Where’s Geralt?”

“He is in the dark and deep.” Jaskier closes his eyes. “Where the brides go to keep. And mothers stand beside and weep. For their unborn soundly sleep.” Jaskier opens his eyes, shrewd and narrow in the way that only the wildly drunk are able to possess such displays of deep speculation. He asks again intently: “Why did you come here?”

Seeing a plain answer for the lost cause it is, Eskel leans back in his seat, looking around the room once more. No one looks at them and yet - they are watched. He shifts, swords on his back, armor packed away. His hand flexes. He could burn this place down.

“Felt good as any direction to walk.”

Jaskier nods. He slumps forward, now released from Eskel and cups his mug of wine with both hands, leeching heat from the tin. “Felt that too. A draw.” His mouth tilts up humorlessly. “Walked right into the damned thick of it.”

Jaskier drums his fingers on the tabletop, drinks with his other hand, looks around the room in flashing eyes, meeting every scant slip of a pupil turned their way. He sneers into his cup, sets hit down harshly. Drags his lute across his lap like a misbehaved child and begins plucking and humming, rocking with the tremors of the music.

“Jaskier,” Eskel tries once more, mouth tingling with wine. “The hells you going on about?”

Jaskier squeezes his eyes shut, brown wrinkles. “Eskel,” he says around a song in his mouth. “Don’t you hear it?” He looks desperately at the Witcher. “The humming?”

The room pitches into silence. The fire blues low and dreary. Eskel’s ears ring as Jaskier stares at him and begins to hum, a throbbing moan in his vocals that makes the apple of his neck pulse, that flexes the chords of his throat. It undulates, that low moaning hum, like wind through a deep bellowing crack in the world. It swallows.

The noise - Eskel flinches with it, temple throbbing, ears swelling with fluid. He shakes his head like a pestered dog and rubs his ears and, feeling the itch fitfully, reaches out and shakes Jaskier’s shoulder.

“Quit that,” he snarls, stricken by something desperate.

Jaskier’s voice croaks on the ascent of a pitch. He gargles on his breath like he’s drowned by it before he heaves, staring at Eskel with an open mouth, stained and worn.

The fire roars. The wine warms. The people of White Stone do not mind them.

“You don’t hear it?” Jaskier asks, staring down at his hands as they flex before he begins rocking his knuckles in a rhythm against the wood. He jitters in his seat, blinking hugely around him as if coming up from sleep. “Gods, I can’t do anything but hear it. I’m going mad.”

The shadows beneath his eyes attest to that. Eskel reaches across the table and presses his palm to the bard’s forehead, searching for a fever to make some sense of Jaskier’s rambling and discordant behavior. But the blood runs as any human’s might. Jaskier closes his eyes pitifully.

“Where is Geralt?” Eskel asks again, resting his hand comfortingly on Jaskier’s shoulder. “These folks keep talking like he’s dead and buried, but all I’ve gathered is he’s on a long hunt.”

“Not a hunt,” Jaskier says, quiet and distant.

“Right,” Eskel amends. A search after some lady. Geralt would get himself in trouble over a woman. It’s about the only thing he does most days. “Bit of lost and found.” No tracker in the land like a Witcher. None like Geralt and his good nose.

“They lied to us.”

Jaskier’s tone lacks all of its usual colorful empathy. It lacks even anger. Eskel looks out at the tavern people. The little girls are gone.

“Lied? About what?”

“It wasn’t one girl,” Jaskier whispers, rhythm of his knuckles picking up. “And they knew - they knew where she’d gone.” The rapping grows frantic. “Into the dark and deep. They lied. They lied to him. And this gods damned-- this noise!” his knuckles spurr across the wood, rough and wild, catching, the skin splitting blood across the bone. Jaskier puts his hands to his ears, bleeding sluggishly from the shaved skin of his knuckles. His hands are frosted with scabs and bruises and worn callouses. “I can’t think! I can’t hear! I’m going mad and Geralt’s dying and then I shall die too!”

No one reacts to Jaskier’s tormented moment. They are not ensconced in darkness or enigma. Their table sits plainly in the corner, well lit, warm, comfortable. And yet, no one minds the bard as he twists up in some unseen pain, as the new Witcher watches with growing alarm.

Jaskier shudders, sucking in a breath, hands falling flat once more - twitching back to life. He cocks his head, rolls a shoulder, starts humming again, desperate little hiccups of rhythm. Eskel watches him.

One last time, Eskel presses into the issue, detaching in slow tethers from the heart beating before him and the intimacy they share. He narrows the situation down. It’s always easier that way.

“When’d you get to White Stone?”

Jaskier swallows, flits a look at him. “Over a week ago.”

“With Geralt?”

“Yes.”

“The humming noise, when’d that start?”

Jaskier shakes his head.

“Jaskier.”

“I don’t know.” He sucks his cheek in between his molars and worries it. “Before. After? Never and always.”

“This contract. Where did Geralt go - and tell me without any rhyme or nonsense.” He enjoys Jaskier’s propensity for the dramatic and syllabically pleasing utterances on most days, but not today. His bones are adrift inside his body.

Eskel does not entertain thoughts of Geralt’s life and death during his time on the Path. How could he tempt his own sanity thinking of his brother - to think of him wounded, or cold, or made still by man or monster? It is only ever in the ascent up the Blue Mountains, only when the wind hollows him out and the snow crushes singingly beneath his feet, when winter and silence swaddles his largonic climb that he readies his heart for the potential of a particular absence that would eat him whole. But year after year, Eskel’s spared by their reunion. He remains complete.

Jaskier rubs his face, pulling on the skin of his skull until the skeleton of himself shines through. Age has yet to make its mark on his face; fat still persists in the shape of his unlined cheek. Fantastically young yet. But he’s thinned. Last Eskel saw him, he thought the bard full of life; life hangs on him now like sodden clothes. His flushed sweetness is hidden.

“We came this way,” Jaskier attempts, swallowing hard and blinking harder. His thumb strokes a note on the high string of his lute, tinny in the air. “By impulse. Instinct. A call. I heard it; I lead us here.” He bites his chapped and stained lip. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Eskel.”

Before Jaskier can dissolve into any suffering, Eskel tops off his cup hurriedly and his own and makes an urging gesture. Jaskier takes a deep drink and nods.

“I don’t know. I don’t - I don’t know. We came upon White Stone and I felt this,” Jaskier touches his chest, pauses, then touches his temple. “I felt an urgency. A compulsion. But I could not think of it all the same. Geralt’s words slipped across me like water. I walked, driven, to a house on the outskirts of the town, dismal and wretched. Taken in by a deep insatiable,” he smiles without meaning it, “stupid curiosity. Geralt entertained my mood until we reached the house. And then he could not stop me. I wanted to go inside so desperately, Eskel. I want to go inside so desperately. I want.”

He looks out past the room, out past the people, to a place not far away, to a house that sits and waits, the black pitch of the door open in anticipation.

“Geralt couldn’t feel it but he dragged me from it. I remember - it got so dark, so quickly. The dark hummed. I went inside the dark and it’s singing in my ear.”

Eskel nods, absorbing. Jaskier’s staring still, trailed off. His head’s cocked and his eyes have pricked onto a spot that Eskel cannot see.

“Jaskier.” Eskel reaches over and touches him. “Jaskier.”

Jaskier sucks in a breath but does not move otherwise. “He axii’d me.”

Eksel’s hand, still on his arm, tightens automatically. He takes hold of the man’s shirt and uses it to drag him an inch closer his way. Only then does Jaskier swivel his attention back to Eskel.

“He axii’d you?”

“Yes. We tried to leave White Stone and I could not. All things lead to that house. And then well; we were not invisible. Not how we are right now.” Jaskier gestures ruefully to the people around them that give them wide berth. “Geralt was approached knowingly. They told him the house was haunted by a wraith of a woman. That it took the Alderman’s new wife. Second wife. He didn’t believe them, not really. But I was - this. And well. Might as well get some coin out of it. He couldn’t do anything else.”

Jaskier inspects his hands, the split of his knuckle. He brings it to his lips and kisses the wound, sucking the blood at the surface. He looks at it again, turning his hands over helplessly before they fall to his lute to finger a chord. “He wasn’t going to leave me.”

Eskel pushes it aside. The only thing that really mattered is this:

“Geralt walked into this house a week ago?”

Here, Jaskier nods, face grim. “A house, Eskel. He walked into that wretched house and has not come out. And I cannot go near it, for his Axii holds me at bay.” Here, he toasts. “And I’ve found that the drunker I am, the stronger his will over me. All that bit about uh, suggestibility.” He takes a sip, or nearly, cup hovering at his lips. “It’s fading.”

Eskel nods, a chill settling over him despite the warmth of the wine. “He’s not magically strong.” That Geralt was even attempting to hold an Axii over Jaskier while he pursed some sort of hunt or search and rescue, however it might be categorized, both impressed Eskel and made him want to slap his brother upside the head for the foolishness and arrogance.

“He’s fading,” Jaskier corrects. “He’s fading. I can feel it. I can feel him fading, Eskel. He’s dying. I know it.”

“Jaskier,” Eskel attempts to mollify even as his heart picks up, ever so slowly, to a worried beat. “Geralt is magically weak, even for a Witcher.” Even for Geralt; Geralt and weakness rarely go together. “That his Axii is holding up more than a day is more account of you being his - well you and him. Being what you are. You wanting it so bad. Him wanting it too.” Here, Eskel pokes Jaskier’s forehead, managing to summon a weak smile to the man’s face. It vanishes too fast to count much for victory.

“Yes but - the house. There’s only so much house to be in. No sounds come from the place save the hum in my ear and heart and no one will acknowledge it. Liars and scoundrels, all of them! All of you!” He sweeps his arm out at the tavern.

“Jaskier!” snaps the woman at the far end of the bar that Eskel had spoken with. “None of that!”

Jaskier bares his teeth but mulishly sulks into his seat, temper snuffed. “Maritha is lucky she’s kind. I would burn this whole place down otherwise.”

“Would you?”

Jaskier shrugs. Tips his cup back and forth on its foot. His indecision and weak threat hangs until he covers his face with his hand, slumping in defeat. He does not rise from the moment, leaving Eskel to contemplate the situation.

“Jaskier,” he decides after he drains his cup and then the pitcher, washing the road and travel away at last. Jaskier finally lifts his face from his palm, the red press of his hand smearing his cheek. He’d nodded off, that much was clear. His eyelids are barely open. “Do you fear that house?”

“Obviously.” He sniffs and inspects his cup’s dregs before refreshing it, finding Eskel has changed to a sweet cider with a potent aroma and flecks of butter like a hundred coins swimming on the shining surface. He murmurs his thanks to Eskel.

“I’ll get you outta here.” Geralt would want that, if he truly feared for his bard.

For a moment, Jaskier only stares at him in drunken uncomprehending flatness before he slams his hands upon the table, wrenching himself from the seat to leer at Eskel and spit madly.

“You would abandon him - your dear wolf? You would leave him to die in the dark and deep?”

The repetition niggles in Eskel's ear, but he has no patience for Jaskier’s surly dramatics and the sloshing of drink on the table. The people stir around the room, pass looks at them. Maritha makes a threatening gesture in the air and Eskel, worn and uneasy with the town of White Stone and the whine in his ear that throbs, that flutters like a cold howl, that coils in spider silk along his hair until his heart falls out of time with itself, grabs Jaskier none too gently and hauls the man up and up, guessing he has a room, demanding it from him, until he’s spilling the bard onto a rumpled and sweat-stiff bed.

“Enough,” Eskel commands, pressing Jaskier down when he tries to rise. “I’d Axii you myself if it wouldn’t turn your bird brain to pulp. But don’t tempt me. See if I don’t wait for Geralt’s sign to go before I mend you to silence and sobriety and send you marching in the opposite direction of all things Witcher.”

Jaskier blows a raspberry at him and flops backwards, twisting in the sheets to bury his face with a moan into his pillow.

“Eskel,” he cries, turning on his side, curling his knees to his chest like the little girls had done downstairs. He is not many years on the earth and so very few spent at Geralt’s side. “Don’t leave us. Don’t leave, please.”

He implores desperately, nakedly, days of drink making him blurred and soft with the begging. Eskel wavers, groaning to himself, and begins to shed his travel-stiff clothes.

“Have you the legs to go fetch me a meal?”

Feeling forgiven and too eager for some form of command amidst his turmoil, Jaskier nods, gathering himself on swaying feet. Eskel pats him heartily on the back as he goes with a genuine thanks to the young bard and takes advantage of the basin of water on the battered chest of drawers. He wonders at the logistics of the lodging, the genuineness of the contract that has sent Geralt into some unfathomable unknown. A house that swallows a Witcher and can keep him for days. The Axii that lingers on Jaskier and fades.

It is not the nature of Witchers to intrude upon another’s contract. Only in negotiation might they overlap or upon request. When skirmishes over territories bring up hordes of ghouls or rotters, a Witcher can eat for months on that regular coin, and the land may host upwards to three of them if it is not a meddling of schools. Once upon a time, when both monsters and Witchers roamed in greater numbers, an abundance of work encouraged their wild cohabitation. But now they keep from each other almost worse than they keep from men themselves, from ire and competition and challenge.

Eskel considers it a blessing of respect to pass over the tracks of another of their dwindled kind. A certain contentment, a lift to his alien isolation overtakes him in those fortunate reminders. He feels at home briefly when he sees the wear of a Brother somewhere on the Path.

There is a prayer for your Witcher other. Prayers for the bodies and swords and medallions you find when nothing else remains of the golden light of their eyes. There are prayers for the passing of a rumor.

No one would believe it. Jaskier might. That witchers pray. That they think in terms of blessing and have them memorized, improvised, that they offer them at all. Don’t all creatures mourn? Is it not the nature of a growing babe to come to recognize the self and the other? They aren’t born from nothing. They were boys once, with promises and secrets and grand thoughts of mountains.

Eskel cups the water of the basin and blesses himself in handful and closes his eyes and thinks of Geralt, seven days gone into the unknown.

_Let the land be merciful to him_  
_Let the beast be gentle with him_  
_Let the armor be strong for him_  
_Let the hand be sweet upon him_  
_Let the bed be soft under him_  
_Let the people be thankful of him_  
_Let the sun be warm over him_  
_Let the stars be many above him_  
_Let the wine be good in him_  
_Let the friends be many among him_  
_And let me hear it from him_  
_All his fortune this year past_  
_And say it unto him again_  
_My Brother of the Path_

He is through the utterance and the looming contemplation of Geralt’s possible death - the haunting thought sticky and dark behind his ribs - when Jaskier shoulders unsteadily back into the room, disposition changed, crowing his victory with hot apple dumplings as big as Eskel’s fist and cold turkey slices. It’s generous and Eskel doesn’t mind that Jaskier hovers beside him and pinches with his fingers small bites between Eskel’s, the bard in contemplation of all the things unsaid and presumed between them.

“You’ll stay?” he asks at length, when Eskel has broken upon the crusty shell of the dumpling to fish out baked apples that dissolve to buttery sweetness in his mouth.

“Yes.”

“You’ll help?” Jaskier taps his foot mercilessly against the floorboards, dragging his weight side to side on his hips. The air smells of baked things and wood smoke, of Jaskier, of wine spilled, of parchment, and of earth and worm so dark and rich Eskel would think someone held gravedirt beneath his nose.

On a whim and compulsion, desiring more comfort to settle his mind and release the cloying sensation built in his chest, he reels Jaskier to him, exchanging the plate on his knee for a man standing between his spread thighs. Jaskier makes a noise, unsteady but welcoming, and rests his hands on Eskel’s shoulders. They have shared intimacies and though it’s been a year since he saw the man last, when he briefly walked beside Geralt and they had day and night together to renew each other’s memories of the other’s body and warmth, to tread those memories anew with Jaskier between them in shared kisses, Jaskier still settles to some familiar comfort against his body. Eskel is the only familiar and sound thing in his world right now. Eskel might as well be an oasis conjured from the unraveling of his mind. A Witcher to save a Witcher. What an infernal prayer Jaskier has made for his deliverance.

He pets the back of Eskel’s hair, first tentatively, then firmly, gripping the muscle of Eskel’s neck finally and prompting Eskel to hold his gaze. Jaskier’s eyes flash with sudden alertness.

“Eskel,” he intones, rattling the Witcher in the lowness of his voice. Jaskier’s voice pitches into that low throbbing hum, just for a moment, before the man bows to him and kisses his snarled mouth. “Please,” he says into the shape of Eskel, conjuring hope.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Eskel cups Jaskier’s jaw, guiding him away from his lips to inspect Jaskier once more. He smells of magic, of something wolven and violent. He hums under Eskel’s fingers, lingers on him like ichor. It’s possible that Geralt’s Axii, held so long, has fouled somehow. Something cavorts out of place. Eskel buries his nose into the juncture of jaw and throat and sniffs Geralt’s bard; Jaskier laughs and sighs, settling with the familiarity of oddness, and waits for Eskel's declarations. “I won’t let you die, little one.”

He accompanies the endearment with a smile, hoping to lift his friend’s spirit. He would think that comfort enough, but Jaskier shakes his head.

“Geralt,” he says, the name complete in its request. It opens like a wound.

“While his Axii stands, it means he’s strong. When the sign breaks, well, then we’ll see about worrying about our wolf.”

He worries now, but what good does that do? Worry - it is an anxious form of anticipation when instinct is gone and stupidity prevails. Worry makes the mind dull and the reflexes slow. Worry means you make a mistake. Eskel does not have time for mistakes. Nor does Geralt.

He knows his brother would not have the supplies to survive long if he were in some infernal depth. Eskel racks his brain for what it could be that holds Geralt, where it could have lead him. A portal, perhaps. A rune that’s dropped him somewhere. Druidic or Djinn or a plain old dark mage. But again, the Axii over Jaskier bodes well. Geralt would have dismissed it or lost it if he were in wild battle.

Eskel grips Jaskier’s shoulder and gives him an affectionate shake. “Hey now, we both know Geralt likes his dramatics sure enough as he pretends otherwise.”

With a long shuddering breath through his nose and a bunching and coiling of tired muscles, Jaskier jerks his head in a nod. He doesn’t believe Eskel’s false reassurance a bit, but it’s a pleasant lie. It’s as good as any other he’s told himself of late. Jaskier fills himself up on a breathe, swelling with air, feeling it catch in his throat on the crest of a note that he resists. His head pounds. He presses against Eskel and nods once more, blowing out his breath.

“Shit,” he declares. “My head’s fucking killing me. Got anything potent in your packs, my good Witcher?”

“Nothing that won’t kill you dead.”

“Tempting.” And when Jaskier smiles, Eskel can see the temptation in that too. As it is, Jaskier only moves for his own belongings, swiftly mixing a powder of his own into a cup of wine and draining it all back with a wrinkled nose. “Gods,” he says, gasping at the last swallow and smacking his tongue. “Bitter.”

“What’s that now?”

“Something to help me sleep.”

“You can’t sleep?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

Jaskier grins at him. “I thought you weren’t in the mood for any games, my dear sound chamber.” He hoots at Eskel, cups his ears, hoots again as if bouncing an echo off the witcher. It’s the kind of thing only a drunk man would find funny. Still laughing, he repeats, “no, I don’t think I sleep.”

“You dreaming?”

“I don’t know.” Jaskier closes his eyes and makes a great show of clamping a hand over his face. “Look - see. Dark. Dark. Yet when I sleep, I see even darker. Am I dreaming or lying awake? I am in the dark and deep with Geralt, growing darker, growing deeper.” He stands in the middle of the room, dimly lit, the fireplace snuffed low despite the many logs, his fingers slackening around the rim of his goblet until it slips free. Eskel catches it before it can clatter to the floor, splashes of red on his hand, powder clinging like scales along the rim.

“Dark and darker still,” Jaskier continues, growing faint, slower, listing right there into something outside of sleep. “I feel it, there, the cold, the close, how it grows, and - how it wants. It wants. It wants. What is that sound. That beating sound of wanting. Like - like- a mouth swallowing. Like a - a pulse.” His mouth opens and closes like a bird begging for water from the gods. Then he counts, slow as anything, as if discovering language for the first time, voice lowering as his head tips back and his neck flexes and lengthens and the chords of his being thin. “Counting off...one.... two….Thr...ee,” he hitches, tumbles, unstoppable, “Four-!”

Entranced in watching, listening, Eskel almost misses it, that skip in Jaskier’s heart. A pulse feints out of place. The heartbeat drops, sudden, a plummet as if the foot has missed the final step. Jaskier’s gasps, agonized, clutches his chest and gasps again. Still, he holds his hand over his eyes and stands in upright richtor, a shocked animal caught in the eye of a great beast. The fire burns low to ember and ash, throttling the room in a vanishing of light.

In two motions, Eskel wrenches Jaskier’s arm down to his side and signs Quen. The sign bursts out around him in a flash, a golden crest, washing forward and filling the space. Jaskier shudders with it. He slackens, then blinks, bright and shiny again. Flames gutter in the iron stove before cracking high with a puff of black smoke that curls up and out the piped vent.

The pressure in the room bulges and settles. Eskel’s ears pop.

“Now that’s worrisome,” Eskel decides, sitting Jaskier back down on the bed and peeling the man’s eyelids back to check his eyes for clarity. “Say, neat trick, little one. Got me a little curious after that show just now.”

And the fact that fucking Quen worked on it, whatever the hells that just was.

Jaskier rolls his eyes, heart back in line though he rubs his chest as if easing an ache. “Now he cares. Fucking witchers. All of you. Gods damn you all.”

But the grave dirt smell hangs in Jaskier’s hair. Eskel pushes his nose to his scalp and breathes it in, teeth set on edge as the smell of foul magic, Quen quartz tang, and Geralt’s alchemical imbuement root themselves into his senses.

“When you say he’s fading,” Eskel asks roughly, “the magic, the Axii?”

“Him. He.”

Eskel had suspected the possibility that the Axii had gone sideways, that Jaskier’s clinging mind to Geralt’s will’s impression blurred into a prison, a sinking drowning need to persist. He thought it the drink. He doesn’t know what he thinks. Whatever’s got Jaskier’s bespelled has Geralt clutched now too now, eating through to the other side of that wicked Witcher's bond. Wherever Geralt is - this dark and deep, ever darkening, ever deepening - it’s hungry to come topside.

“How long till that shit hits you?”

“What shit?”

“The medicine you just took.”

Jaskier’s mouth opens and closes and then he flushes. “Shit. Speaking of - shouldn’t go pissing the bed on a guest. It will have me quite soon embracing my beauty sleep. Or nightmare, it seems!” Like a marionette plucked to life, Jaskier gets to his feet with a clap, with a ditty and a whistle and a hard tap of his unreasonable boots to find his way to the privy. So few years spent at Geralt’s side but at the least he's acclimatized to the errant torments that follow Witchers. Better than most, that is, not that Eskel can think of many others who make a habit of keeping their company.

Fucking hell. Eskel takes up his plate again and his drink. Sleep. Sleep. He’ll solve it come day break. All things are easier come daybreak. Geralt’s alive. Geralt’s Geralt. And if Geralt’s Geralt and in this mess, then Eskel must be himself and weigh it out more than his brother had, or else what good is two dead witchers? Just a whole lot of nothing after that. Two witchers and a bard; fuck, wouldn’t even have anyone to tell the tale. The bard needs to live. They need a good song out of it. At the very least, a good song.

That wouldn’t be so bad. Him and Geralt, together in song. Worse ways to die. Lonelier ways to die. A song. A good tune.

Eskel hums a few bars of nothing, rubs at his ear and tidies himself up just in time to fall into bed with Jaskier, kissing him once, twice, a few times, tucking Geralt’s lover close to him and throwing a heavy arm around the warmth of a freely generous body. Sure enough, Jaskier’s dunked into a hard sleep, feet sweating beneath the sheets, fingers twitching on Eskel’s ribs, ever so gently clawing out a rhythm over his Witcher heart.

In the hours between pitch black and light black, Jaskier gets a knee into Eskel’s kidney, worming himself out of bed. Eskel grunts, rolls over, peels his ear to listen to the bard’s tottering steps. Quietly thanks Melitele for not having the man piss the bed. Eskel’s so goddamn tired he’s not sure he woulda done more than rolled over and left the bard to the wet, and even forgiven him for it, untroubled.

Into sleep his slips, only for that aching emptiness to rouse him again, a birdsong and windwhistle creeping into the room. Eskel wakes, cracking into the predawn, the first pink kiss of day haloing in through the window, distant lover to all things light. He rolls onto his back, stretching, groaning pleasantly to be in a bed once more - reaching into the cold blanket for his nowhere to be found companion.

He breathes in, waking with each stretch of his lungs. A cart rumbles outside. White Stone waits quietly.

The organ-sour stink of fear hit his nose. Churned earth. Wine sweat.

Eskel lifts from sleep in a thunder of motion, feet on the floor, body swinging into action. He falls into his clothes, huffing great breaths of Jaskier’s scent, sticky in the air. From one step to the next, he settles into himself, grabbing his silver sword as he passes from the bedroom’s threshold, iron latch falling behind him in a gut-tight grind of sound. He roars down the stairs, out the door, sure and swift and hunting.

Only the single cart drawn by a single farmer breaks the silence of the day. The man lifts a hand in greeting to Eskel, propriety as strong in the bone as autumn's chill. Eskel ignores the gesture, following his course, pushing down the uselessness of cauterized anger and fright, misplaced within a Witcher. It bubbles up in his gut, sick, gone again between his breathes, dispelled by the calm rational of his mind. He swallows. His ears pop. He hurries across and through town, until the space between house and business narrow, until farms drop in golden sweeps, until The House rises up in distant spire, in a pale shriek of neglect and warp, obelisk thrumming from the empty yawn of its beckoning door.

He barrels straight into Jaskier who shambles forward towards the tongue of The House, yanking him up around his middle, the bard giving way to a cry, a scream, to battering arms and kicking feet. He flails like a drowning babe, gasping, no end rightway up, the world topsyturvy, the senses addled. Back they go, back until pumpkin vines curl around Eskel’s feet and trip them both up, until they land among bulging fruit and harvest orange faces, waxy and patient for plucking, crow pecks in the thick rind.

“He’s gone. He’s gone!”

“Jaskier.”

Eskel pins him by wrist, by a knee to his thighs, by a mass greater than Jaskier can pretend to find in his wildest conjurations of courage. Jaskier’s eyes roll in his skull and he heaves. His diaphragm flexes with tension as he struggles to catch his breath, pupils impossibly painfully wide in the thin blue of his eyes, unable to focus and find Eskel.

Eskel pops Quen right into Jaskier's face, watches the pupil shrink to a pinprick. Jaskier's mouth opens and he groans, grinding his head back into the dirt.

“The Axii,” Jaskier mutters miserably. “It’s gone.”


	2. Below

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eskel can't turn around. His neck prickles. If he turns around, he's not sure he'll be able to find the right way out again. Fear perches at the back of his mind, no, right behind his eyes, throbbing through the chords and nerves of his body. If he turns around, there will not be a way out. The dirt will come. The deep will deepen.
> 
> His Quen is failing and the dark is creeping.
> 
> “Wolf,” Eskel nearly begs, shifting around the cold corpse hanging from him.

* * *

Act II - Below

* * *

Heron Rotteran wooed Amarda Feil with a threading hook of amaranthe.

There’s more to it than that, but the threading hook, glossy with oil, perfect, the purple deep and shot through - warmly given from his hand to hers so she can cradle it like a stone, like a precious gem, like the blood of the land made whole - he made it for her, this humble man’s promise. Felled the tree. Chopped the wood. Carved the shape. Sanded the grain. Varnished the seal. He dipped his head to her mother to allow him inside so he could test the peg and see it slotted snugly into place at her wheel. He and his confidence, the promises he made. He, the newest appointed to his town’s council, a town but two days northern ride. He and the offer of that white stone house, steady against the elements. He and his quiet grief over his first wife and the child that never came and yet took mother and all with him.

Then this: the inevitable tumble of their eager bodies, the sudden bump of her swelling. The rush to a wedding. She’d always dreamed of it in the autumn, of golden leaves and sweet roasted pumpkins and an apple cake like her mother used to make. But they hurried into it, made giddy by the promise of everything in life ready to spill out before them. They married in the summer, the sun high, the heat melting, her dress crisp white linen.

Though Heron swept her into his home, lifting her feet above the threshold; though he was young and full in the doorway, and held her like a slip in his arms, a caught animal of victory - her heart rabbitting, becoming rabbit, becoming a flighted prey organ in her chest - something too slipped in with them. Her fingers wove it deeper with every thread as she licked her thumb over her wheel and counted the rows of her pattern, minding her way through her work, foot to the pedal to the floor in measured practice. Four three two...

> _Oh my son betwixt my thighs_  
>  _drinking this blood for free_  
>  _Growing so deep inside_  
>  _Crawling on hand and knee_  
>  _Cause everybody knows_  
>  _into the dark I go_  
>  _To find that place unknown_  
>  _And everybody fears_  
>  _And everybody hears_  
>  _That deep and endless moan_

She doesn’t hear Heron come into the bedroom. Does not feel him at her side. It’s her name, over and over until it rolls drumbeat, until finally it catches in her ear like the tender torn skin of a cuticle. It cuts her loose.

“Hello,” he greets, sitting beside her on the bed. Amarda cradles her belly, the weight of a living thing pressed to her palms, stretching her outwards. “What were you singing?”

“Singing?”

“Just now.”

“Oh. “ She thinks. “A song.”

His eyes look out past her, past the white stone of their home, past the white stone of the next, and the next, to a place beyond them. He takes her hand. She holds back tightly, feeling now the tremble of herself.

She trembles.

She wanders sleeplessly, humming to herself. Heron creeps in the room around her, filling up the slipping space. He holds her hand tightly in the day, fingers laced, her thumb keeping time against his knuckles. She thinks he’s begun to look unwell. Not sleeping enough. When she tells him, he only holds her tighter and apologizes.

The people do not like to look at her anymore.

He nails the shutters closed.  
He bars the door at night and sleeps with the key beneath his pillow.  
She tries not to wake him when she sings, one hand cupping her cunt where it’s hot and sore, the other trailing the wall looking for cracks, singing into the hollow holes of her house, mouth to the stone, to the salt of the earth, licking her way wet and free.  
The house is dark and not nearly enough so.  
Her dreams are dark and growing darker.

“Please,” he begs, on his knees. “Please, no more of that noise.”

He presses her tapping fingers together in prayer. She is already on her knees. She has been on her knees.

“Please, stop,” he pleads, and it is not to her that he begs and bows his head. Her bones hurt, and he is praying to the space between them. The porous netting of her body that resonates, the skip-time pockets of her heartbeat. The empty places inside her have filled up with an echo. She is so full. She is bursting with fullness. She is not deep enough to hold it all in the dark of her body. Does the light shine through her skin? Does what grows inside her turn to it like a hungry flower and search for the world beyond the endless throttled cave of her womb? Does it hunger with an open mouth against the amniotic sac, mouth a hole, a gum-pink swallow, swallowing her inside her. Mouthful after mouthful and drowning with it.

She might turn inside out. Find that hungry mouth with her fingers and press her flesh to the stubby tongue, the shallow cheek, push her meat back into place.

She hears the moaning from inside out of herself. The rhythm of a heart out of sync. Her womb sings to her. Foot. Hand. Foot. Hand. A marching tune. Palm. Knee. Palm. Knee. She crawls in time. She swells in inverse, dragging downward. The popped wrinkle of her bellybutton hangs like a teat. Suckle. Swallow. Let it eat.

He knows where she goes when she goes.

It knows too.

Deeper. Darker. She cannot see but she feels the earth in her nails, the press of space, a shrinking beat, her heart slowing with loss of heat. Her braids unwind and her ribbons drape and fingers settle on her nape. The House it breathes The House it bellows and still she hears that moaning echo. In her sleep and wide awake, she creeps herself to far away. Deeper still her winding way where earth has yet been unmade. The hole that swallows the hole that wails, the hole she’ll fill so snugly well.

She fits, as smooth and sure as a peg. She fits. She fills that hole all for herself. She makes it room for two.

The House waits.

* * *

The House waits, not a house but a dwelling, refuge to horror and haunt. The dizzy form rises in toothsome and discordant angle, in brittle white, stained with the dawning sky. The early fingers of sunlight sink and dive between the cracks of cold shrunk stone that gape and growl in shudders of mineral and quartzian fleck. Eskel bares his teeth at the loom of it, jagged in the sky, in sharp shriek and thorn. The door judders open, empty and velvet, black pitchless, insides gutted. He stares into the open door, the cold and clean of it, the perfect regiment line of the depth, trying to see the spine that arches through The House, the bone of a mountain carved and naked. He cannot see. He looks and cannot see. The House waits in hungry offering, in starved surrender. It only has to wait. Prey wanders.

Jaskier sits in prone and readymade grief, knees to his chest, arms folded, body collapsed in on itself. He’s deafeningly silent. There’s no hitching sobs, no hiccuping whines. Eskel holds Quen above them, keeping whatever dark enchantment entices Jaskier into The House at bay.

“Jaskier,” Eskel says at length, crouching down beside him. Jaskier lifts his face from his arms, face streaked in silent tears, eyes rimmed in red and clotted daintily by his lashes. Eskel almost has to laugh. Figures Geralt would find himself some pretty-crying fool to follow after him. Geralt would manage to be the only Witcher to earn such pearlish tears.

Eskel begins the sign for Axii, finger cutting through the air, only for Jaskier to snap to furious attention and slap at his hand and face.

“Wait! Damn you, Eskel! By the gods, Witcher!” Jaskier latches himself around Eskel’s hand like an invasive vine, tangling himself over the Witcher.

“I need to get you out of here,” Eskel explains, unwilling to drop the haven of Quen around them and have Jaskier descend into his frightful state once more. As it is, he remains inert with Jaskier clutching his arm so dearly.

“And then what? No. Axii me? No, not again.” Jaskier throws an arm around Eskel’s neck and hugs him, holding the dispelled palm of Eskel’s hand tightly with his. “Eskel. What would you do next, dear sir?”

“Find Geralt.”

Jaskier makes a wounded noise into his ear and hugs him closer, seizing once with a shaking sob that he swallows down. “He’s dead.”

“He’s not dead.”

“Please, Eskel. Please, I felt him die. I felt it. I woke to him leaving me. Please.”

“Geralt’s not dead.”

“You would do this to me? Bind your will with mine and have me feel you fade from this world? I cannot endure it again. I’m doomed. You should run, Eskel. Run. I am doomed to this House, to die within it like Geralt. I hear death, feel death.”

Eskel shakes free, shouldering Jaskier off of him. “Geralt isn’t dead.”

“He is,” Jaskier insists, misery losing a battle against stupid stubborness. He juts his chin up at Eskel. “I felt it so.”

“Well I didn’t,” Eskel snaps, fangs clicking on harsh insistence. “Geralt’s not dead. I’d feel it if he were.”

“You’d feel it?” Jaskier scoffs and looks away, intent on his heartbreak, before his face goes soft and sorry and he looks back at Eskel with sudden comprehension. “Oh, Eskel.”

Eskel’s sore mouth curls in a show of teeth that Jaskier doesn’t deserve, but how dare this bard of but a few years, how dare he insist that he alone would feel it if Geralt left this world. Eskel would feel it. Surely his heart wound rend. His skin would burn. A scar would appear on him of untraceable origin. He knows it's nonsense, to presume some tether tying his soul and Geralt’s, but they have passed decades together, they have passed whole mortal lifetimes in bond - would life be so cruel as to take Geralt from Eskel while he slept, leaving only a bard of a boy to feel the passage of his wolven-hearted brother?

“He's not dead,” Eskel repeats, swallowing his frail nerves. He grips Jaskier's shoulder. “I'm going to get him out of there.”

“You're mad.”

“Not saying I ain’t.”

Jaskier laughs, scrubbing a hand across his face. He falls back onto the grass, a crumple of burnt sugar leaves haloed beneath his head. “I'll go with you. I'll be dead soon otherwise.”

“No can do. Geralt would hate that.”

“You can't leave me,” Jaskier protests, propping himself up on his elbows. “Eskel. He's my wolf too.”

Eskel snorts and pushes Jaskier on the chest, pinning him down effortlessly. “He did his best to keep you from that House. Don't rush into it and undo all his good work.”

Jaskier grips his wrist, at first in defensive anger before the clutch shifts, roots to tangle with Eskel’s fingers. Jaskier lifts his rough worn hand to that damned singing mouth of his in a hot panting kiss of supplication, praying over the knobs of Eskel’s knuckles. “What would you have me do then, good Witcher? Wait for the inevitable?”

“No faith in me, little one?”

“It would betray my fiercer faith in Geralt to believe any other more capable than he. What barker would I be otherwise?”

“Shame. Shame for you both. That House is magic and that's just not a fair fight for Geralt. Me though,” Eskel pats Jaskier’s cheek. “Different story. Want you to conjure up a good song about it while you wait.”

Jaskier huffs but some of the grief lifts from him. There we are. Eskel isn't one for endless moping. Doesn't do any good. And as pretty of a crier Jaskier is, Eskel much prefers the foppish fool to be cheerfully chirping.

Besides: Geralt's not dead.

Jaskier makes a great show of sniffling and wiping his tears and rallying his spirits. If he refuses to look at The House, though his eyes twitch and quiver with the urge, all the better.

“If I leave your shield, what will happen?”

“I ‘spect you’ll go stark raving, foam at the mouth, and fling your pretty head through that goddamn doorway like a bolt.”

“Well!” Jaskier claps his hands together and rubs his palms nervously. “That sounds dreadful.”

He looks at his hands, the chafing rub of his palms coming to a stop. His brow ticks. He taps his fingers together slowly, touching pad to pad. His tongue pokes out from his lips in brief complicated thought.

“What do we do?” he asks distractedly.

“Thinking about it right now.”

“You’re really going in after him?”

Eskel works his jaw and casts his eyes at that waiting place. “Do you remember what you said, about them lying to you and Geralt about The House?”

“Huhm,” Jaskier taps his fingers together again, face screwed up in distant thought. “Yeah. Bloody horse-fucking liars. Left it to the little girls to come tell me the tales. They were always begging me to sing and play for them, said no one does anymore. Made an information trade. Kids are good sources, Geralt always says.”

“What are the tales?”

_It ate it ate it ate._

Jaskier shrugs, giving up on whatever’s caught his attention with his hands. “That it wasn’t just this Heron Rotteran’s wife. Every once in awhile, for as long as anyone can remember, people get...stuck. Entranced like me. Sometimes people here. Sometimes people coming near the town. No one knows what it is. A lot of girls, they say, their women, they start carrying on like I’d been, singing -- singing this strange song, getting creeperly. Like it’s some kind of sickness. Like a fever dream we all share. Boys too. Not a lot of grown men, not usually. There’d been a woodcutter a few years back, lonesome man, the girls said.”

“The humming,” Jaskier whispers, trailing off. He wraps his arms around himself as if warding off a chill. “I can’t hear it right now. It’s...quiet. It’s quiet again.” He laughs nervously. “Listen to me, welcoming quiet. Blessed silence! Oh, Geralt would have a laugh right now. Tell him I’ll be nice and quiet, won’t you? It’ll have him rushing right into my arms. Tell him - Eskel, find him and tell him it will be nice and gentle here. Peaceful. There will be peace.”

“Alright now,” Eskel tugs Jaskier to his feet as he stands back up. Quen or no, Jaskier’s still had a hell of a week; Geralt alive or not, the rough slip from a longterm Axii hold isn’t a kind thing to a mind. Geralt’s a fucking idiot. He’s lucky Jaskier’s isn’t any loonier - the bard’s loony enough most days from what Eskel’s seen, a mad fool for following a Witcher around like Geralt’s some knight errant. “Let me have a think and you make good on all that peace and quiet you promised.”

“Ah, right. Peace and quiet.” Jaskier claps his hands together and clears his throat of the last vestiges of tearful thickness. Coughs again. Shifts his feet across the grass and crackling leaves. “Eskel--”

“What?”

“Oh, ah, well, just-”

“What, Jaskier?”

“If you aren’t going to Axii me-”

“Feeling tempted to right now-”

“Fuck off with that, Witcher, I’m having a thought here-”

“Dawdle more, Jaskier, Geralt has all the time in the world-”

“How will you keep me from following you?”

“See now, that’s just what my mind settled upon. How do you feel about bondage?”

“H-hey now, hey, Geralt did that to me before and I did not like it. Not one bit. Don’t leave me behind. I’ll go mad. That sound will come back and eat me whole.”

“You won’t let me Axii you.”

“No. No.” Jaskier presses to the edge of Quen, passing his hand through the light, flinching back to cradle his hand to his chest as if the world has burned him. “No. I - Eskel, I’m a coward. I am. I’m brave enough to admit I’m a coward. I’m scared. I could piss myself with fear, knowing what lay before us both. And - I’m trying very hard to be brave. I think you should go. Let me say it. Leave us both. There aren’t many Witchers in this world. Let me be a brave coward too scared to be left alone and too scared to feel another friend die. Geralt wouldn’t want you to die going after him.”

“Just yesterday you begged me to stay and help.”

“I’m a coward and a fool and wretchedly in love. I’m a madman of the most common kind. Don't listen to me. I thought it was clear, I’m out of my mind.”

“And just a minute ago you called me mad. I’m of the common kind too.”

“You’re no coward.” He says nothing on the other matters. To be a fool and to be in love are afflictions of equal kind.

“I fear many things.”

Jaskier’s mouth twists. “Admitting a few secrets of the Witchering kind? Geralt says they burned fear out of him.”

“Geralt says a lot of things.”

Jaskier laughs. “Hardly.”

“When it counts.”

Jaskier laughs again, looking at Eskel helplessly. “Fine, my fine Witcher, vault off into the dark and the deep and leave me to weep. A song? I will spend my last sane hours composing. This wretched town can burn the memory but I’ll sing it to the universe to keep.”

“You’re decided?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Don’t take it back now, little one, I’ll be counting on the moral support. I want a great big ballad like you gave our wolf.”

“It will have to be a great big ballad to match you, Eskel. I’ll write in a very large font too, to be sure the point gets across. An ode to you and your three swords and the strength with which you wield them all.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Eskel loops his arm through Jaskier’s and draws Jaskier close to him, holding him tight. “I’m going to drop my Quen, don’t want to burn it all up before I go in there. But I’m thinking - trying to figure out what’s inside that House that kept Geralt. Portal, maybe. Listen, Jaskier, you might die.”

Jaskier squacks.

“If I had the supplies, I’d bomb that House to rubble, but I can’t leave Geralt like that. I want his body. I’m not letting that place have his body.”

They never get the body. They rarely get the amulet. If they do, it’s usually only after they’ve killed the bounty hunter that’s boasting with it. But the bodies - the body of a Witcher deserves a burial. A burning. Eskel wants Geralt whole. He wants him in pieces. He will carry out the dirt itself that’s black with his blood and place that into a bottle for the sea to swallow. He wants whatever remains.

But Geralt isn’t dead.

Eskel breathes.

“Now hold tight to me like you like me, Jaskier.”

Jaskier dutifully obeys, going so far as to press a kiss to Eskel’s cheek. “Before I lose my mind, let me say, it’s not a hardship to lose it with you, my friend.”

Eskel gives him a squeeze. “Don’t go soft on me.”

“I never go soft.” Jaskier kisses him again with a devilish smile that eases the cracks of exhaustion maring his young face.

With a bark of a laugh, Eskel drops the Quen, prepared to keep Jaskier from descending to lunacy. Jaskier sucks in a steadying breath, sharp and high and pained, squeezing his eyes shut and squeezing Eskel dearly. He holds his breath.

And holds it.

The Witcher stares the bard in the face and the bard, after winking one eye open suspiciously, and then the other, stares back, eyes focused and blinking steadily.

“Is this the part where I go, uh, all rather a bit foaming and diabolical?” Jaskier ventures to say, grimacing up at Eskel in anticipation of the worst.

“Thought it would be…”

“I don’t feel any more unstable than usual. Geralt’s not here to judge. He keeps better record than me I’m afraid to admit. Not that I consider my bouts of emotion unstable, moreso the loving affairs of the great heights of poetic indecency and revelry....”

Eskel sniffs Jaskier's hair, finding him quite free of the hanging scent of death that's been there since his arrival. He doesn’t prickle with enchantment or a blistering stagnant reek. “You smell normal.”

“Eskel,” Jaskier says, lacking his flirtatious tone, veering sharply into a slow and ugly realization. “Eskel, I think…”

And finally, turning his head as if his bones grind and creak all along his spine in animal reluctance, Jaskier fixes wet eyes upon The House, pupils narrowing to pinpricks in the swimming of sunken blue.

“I think The House has gotten what it wanted. It,” he licks his lips, jaw quivering, “it doesn’t feel hungry anymore.”

“It ate,” Eskel murmurs, holding Jaskier up, holding himself up; they two, breaking and slanting together like felled trees soon to be set to flame, groan with the crumble of hope. “It ate. It ate.”

It changes nothing.

The House waits, and Eskel can wait no longer.

“Jaskier?”

“Eskel?”

“You’ll write me a balad?”

“I will make it beautiful.”

That’s as good of payment as he’s ever gotten. Jaskier kisses him firmly on the mouth, holds his face dearly and kisses him again, slowly, pleadingly, no more asking for Eskel to change his mind, as he no longer has the heart to beg for anything but perhaps to wish frightfully for Eskel’s safe return. Eskel does not give to the ache, to the slow subsuming suspicion of what he will find inside The House, of what he will not recover from when he finds it. Instead, he lifts Jaskier from his feet and kisses him in sound return, taking rare pleasure in the gasp that Jaskier releases into his mouth with naked sweetness.

No, Eskel could not stand to have Axii’d him as Geralt had, to know how easily he might have held sway over Jaskier’s mortal and eager mind. This is better. A kiss farewell. It’s more than he’s thought himself ever fated to earn. And he knows too that Geralt must have kissed Jaskier like this, bowed against him, teased the edge of a promise and a goodbye. A kiss and he’s gone. He seeks out the memory of Geralt in the bard’s mouth, hopes some remnant of flesh and spit, of a canine-bite, slips into his mouth. A kiss for the Witcher he may never kiss again.

Content with the knowledge of his song for a reward for the body he will retrieve, Eskel shrugs his shoulders and presses himself into the velvet dark of The House, Jaskier’s taste fading on his lips.

Inside it is a home that is home to Nothing. There is a clabbered stone hearth, a hanging wrecked iron spit and cauldron. There are herbs dried to dust that dissolve to powdered ruin beneath his fingers. There is the ghost of a pallet in the corner and an upturned bench warped with time. There is a root cellar, flung open, and the air from below travels cold and clean across his face. His medallion hums but when he touches it, it does not jump to his fingers in warning. His sword hums, but when he squeezes the hilt it goes quiet in silent silver. He hums, but when he turns his ear to hear his own bones, they fall to a hush, sunk deep into the meat of him, carrying the meat of him.

There are two wooden slats dug into the root cellar as it descends. The ground stays sturdy. The House rises tall above him. His boot hits packed dirt.

“Jaskier,” he calls over his shoulder, turning to look back, to search for the bard waiting beyond the door. He turns, and the door is a thimble of light, wobbling in the air like the tower torch of a town leagues away. His pupils throb in his eyes, pooled wide and still, still, he cannot see.

“Jaskier!” and he hears his voice echo and clatter dully, like rocks dropped into deep water. His voice vanishes with a ripple; the surface glassens. The earth, far above, smooths around the shape of him descending.

He faces the tunnel, which grows ever deeper and ever darker, the light from outside faded into grays, into numb ink. When he looks backwards once more, the light is wholly gone. He sees nothing and Nothing. When he breathes, he pulls the darkness into his lungs, weighed heavy with it beneath his slow beating heart. He bloats with it.

Hesitating, he puts a hand up on the wall of the root cellar’s entrance, fingers digging at the hard earth, the wood frame, the white stones that sit in the land like the bones of shallow graves.

If he lifts his foot and tries to take a step, will The House let him? He can just barely see. He is not seeing at all but imagining his hand upon the earth, the shape of wood, the path out. If he tries and fails, will he be strong enough to go forward, to seek Geralt in that deep and dark if the way out lays closed? Would he have the heart to bear on, to fight the shuddering animal within him? Will this place swallow him whole as it had his wolf, Jaskier’s song for him to never be paid? A kiss, fading in his mouth. A thought, fading within him.

He pushes on until there is no longer even a speck of light behind him, until he is shrew blind. He feels, faintly, a tickle on his face, Witcher senses stretching like whiskers, chaos and ichor boiled in his blood. Surging with it, finally he dares to cast Quen, the sign turning his fingertips golden as hallowed light manifests from within, spooling out from the forged core of his Witcherhood.

The shield lifts the dark to hover in draping curtain around him. He can see the ground below, the hollow tunnel within which he stands, and nothing else. He opens his mouth, hesitating, before daring to call out.

“Hello?”

It bounces in an empty ring, a tin bell struck and forgotten. Not that hearing anything back would be particularly comforting right now, but Eskel strains in the answering quiet. He hasn’t walked for more than a few minutes, but already the tunnel suffocates around him. Is it his imagination that it’s moving, ever so slightly, against the edge of his Quen? He presses his palm to the cold wall, then his body, then his face, eking along the wall like a phantom, no shadow to speak of, breathing and holding his breath, trying to find the breathing of the earth. He hums and the walls hum and he cannot hear it but he feels it. He burns a mark into the ground beneath him, Igni smoking in his hands, and carries on, leaving behind the charred impression that he was here.

He was here. Something living tread here. He does not let Quen fade. He grips the sign in his fist, burning it into his palm. Let him scar with the light.

Passing a hand along the wall as he makes his slow way, Eskel burns himself a memory beneath The House of White Stone. Fingering the grooves of travellers past, his tongue finds a foul melody, a humming song wearily hewn and sang henceforth in agony. In his croaking voice grown ever chapper and lips split with fervent licking, Eskel opens his mouth in the dark and deep and sings to nothing, no one, and none to keep. The words, ringing in his ear, no sooner disappear, than the hollow tunnels twist and veer.

> _Oh my feral foxen lover_  
>  _I used to know your fur and bones_  
>  _till the day you fled to lands far’over_  
>  _and left me with blooded wounds and moans_  
>  _cause everybody knows_  
>  _That the wolf who cries alone_  
>  _Is bleaker for his foes_  
>  _And bares his fangs unshown_  
>  _Now everybody cower, now everybody hide,_  
>  _For this wolf will hunt down his fox bride_  
>  _Fox bride_  
>  _Fox bride_

Eskel laughs dizzyingly, slumping against the wall. His strength goes and he skitters, Quen fluttering and winnking out only for him to grunt and twist the sign, wrestling it back to force. He trips again, dazed, blood pumping loudly, making his veins throb. He feels the sluggish beat, his chest gone tight. He slides again and gravity catches him, curls his stomach.

Deep. He’s deep. Eskel shakes himself, scrabbling for his barings. His eyes ache with the light. He pulls his waterskin to his lips, slaking a thirst he did not know he had but now bubbles up in cracks and grooves, in the baked and scoured flesh of his throat. He coughs on the water, coughs up grave dirt and mineral ash, spittle specked in white chips. It clots in his nose and he hacks on it. The ground is sloped. He steps again and slides on loosened earth, on the spongy gluttonous turning mass of worms that churn in a slick sickening swarm beneath his feet.

Eskel shouts, too loud, jumping in his flesh, writhing all over with the decayers. He paces forward, undone, hearing the bodies turn to mash under his heavy foot, sees the sink of his weight vanish as more worms fill the space he’s left behind. He backs further into the dark and the deep, light going out in his distraction.

He hears nothing.

He hears the wet churn of consumption beneath him.

“Godsdamnit,” he snarls, casting his sign again, arm quivering.

He should not be this tired.

It’s only been --

He drinks his water again and feels the lightness of the skin. His bladder pulses with fullness.

He has been drinking.

He has been walking.

He has been...his throat is tight with strain, his vocals sore with use. He is not a singer.

He has been singing.

The muscle of his chest spasms with tightness. Eskel gasps, grunting over his heart’s exertions. Pressing a hand to his chest, he feels through his gambeson the rocky stumble of his heartbeat, Witcher heavy. Heavy like the silver around his neck, like the swords upon his back.

“No,” he repeats, closing his eyes. Quen holds strong. This House will not have him. Not until he has Geralt back. It will not take them both. It will not. Eskel will not pass over these lands knowing what they've stolen.

Lip curled back, Eskel growls and hisses at the endless night of it all, the pitch space between spaces. He looks up, what he thinks is up, but the world has twisted on him. He coils into it in return, spitting curses that would make Lambert whistle approvingly.

Eskel whistles now, shrill and high, laughing around the pucker of his lips, whistling again. A jaunty too. A sailor’s jig. A whorehouse hymn.

It helps. He whistles at the dark and clenches around Quen and parades himself madly onward.

Until he finds the body.

Quen falls over the white of Amarda Rotteran’s dress suddenly. One moment it is nothing but dirt and then Eskel is tripping over her, smeared in baptismal blood drenched between her legs. There's no smell, no presence to her. She is there as sudden as a flash.

Her swollen belly sickens him. Cold and still and full of something never born. He kneels beside her, calming in the face of death. Her face, once dirty, has been wiped clean. She is laid gently on the ground, pulled from a hovel just to the side, in the crease of the walls. Almost a grave and yet - almost perfect. Eskel touches the cold earth, the perfect groove for a body. Even her hands have a space -- the ditch has been made by hand, painstakingly so. Fingernails have left trenches in the raked gravesite.

One look at Amarda’s hands shows her broken and bloody fingers, torn off fingernails broken back like bone, the pitch deeply stained into her skin, now gray and empty of all life, of all the things she once promised herself to make true. Eskel lays a palm on her belly, so still and silent, and murmurs an apology to the life that never knew life.

Eskel touches her face, following the thumbprints that had wiped her clean, that had soothed the dried lines of tears stained beneath her murky eyes.

Within the dome of Quen, Eskel fights a spike of adrenaline racing his heart. Life rattles within him. His heart overflows with it, pulsing hot and sharp all the way up to his throat. Eskel gasps, holding a hand to his aching throat as a beating rhythm taps the back of his tongue.

He bows over with it, hacking, clawing at the earth. Quen goes out and the dark moves in, festering out over Amarda’s body, crawling and living. The earth softens beneath him, his boots and knees and hands sinking as it writhes. Eskel’s face touches the ground and he gasps as the damp taste touches his lips, igniting the memory of a farewell kiss. The dirt leaps inside his mouth.

Eskel grits his teeth, rearing upwards, burning Igni into the ground in a thunderous clap of smoke and spark. In the flash, the shadow of the depth whines in retreat.

Through the pounding tempo of his head, bouncing finally in a strange overlapped, he hears a disjointed voice in terrible discord, of even worse musical quality.

> _I drink my brother’s beer, my lover’s beer_  
>  _My friend’s beer, and my father’s beer-_

“Geralt?” Eskel calls, desperate and heaving, pushing Quen out over him, blinking hazily up at the ceiling of the tunnel above him. It’s low. It’s shrunk. The path has been growing narrow and tight.

Eskel latches onto the song desperately, following with another verse.

> _“I drink the queen’s beer, I drink her sister’s beer,_  
>  _Her cousin’s beer and her mother’s beer-!”_

The singing doesn’t return, the voice far away and lost again, but Eskel rouses with the familiar voice, a grin slipped onto his face.

“Alright, Wolf, hang in there,” he calls, hand cupped to his mouth. Geralt is alive. He’d been right. The only thing he hears in response is a shuffling scratching sound. Geralt’s at the end of this tunnel. It doesn’t matter that to find him means he must go deeper still. It must be him. It has to be. He does not entertain what else could be waiting for him around the next bend.

Eskel hums along to Jaskier’s stupid Oxenfurt beer song, the one he’d used to rouse the crowd to ignore the intimidating presence of two armed Witchers and keep them with a roof over their head and a full belly when Eskel had travelled alongside them before the Pontar split their group in two.

The song puts a skip in his step; Quen blossoms wider, brighter, his spirit lightened in good memory.

He follows the rat scratch of what can only be Geralt; in the dark, in the deep, in nowhere at all, Eskel would know him.

With Quen’s golden halo hovering and holding the suffocating darkness at bay, Eskel finally finds the source of the sound. His sign’s light stretches forward, crawling through the dark, to find first black caked boots then dusty leathers and finally the whole of Geralt.

“Geralt!”

Geralt doesn’t turn. Eskel moves closer, illuminating more than just his outline. He’s filthy, silver of his hair covered in dirt, his armor chalky with debris. The light warps around him, paints him in a tall lick of flame. Eskel takes another step towards him. A slower step. Hesitating. The ground gives softly beneath his foot, freshly dug and spongy, sinking. Swallowing.

“Wolf.”

Another step and Eskel’s shoulders knock into the tunnel walls. He forges ahead, feeling the earth cinch around him, coming to squeeze and swallow. Geralt’s moving, faintly, a shift of his form. The Quen holds back the darkness, the radiant aura puddled out in the small space. The ceiling crumbles into his hair, litters clay onto his face to weigh on his lashes and catch in his nose and mouth with each breath.

Geralt digs weakly at the wall of earth before him. The tunnel narrows around him, envelops the Witcher’s form in a sordid embrace. Geralt presses to it, breathing into the earth, huffing his exhaustion. He drags handfuls of dirt and white pebbled sediment down around him, reaching up like a slow crawling creature, a vermin made thing, gloved fingers scraping into the namesake stone and the soil, flinging it down to his feet, behind him, spraying Eskel in its mad arc.

“Brother?”

At this, Geralt stops. His hands press to the tunnel’s stunted face then drop, barely able to hang in the limited room. He turns sideways, turns his gaunt and pale face to Eskel. The black pupils of his eyes recede in the offered light. His lips, dry and cracked, stand out as bloody marks from his stubbled face, chewed and licked raw from thirst, from the irritation of debris, from staving off his own gargling voice.

The sight - Geralt twists like a shade, drawn up colorlessly, in fraught and wavering lines. In this dark and in this depth, he looks both shrunken and stretched, pulled apart and hung up on misfit bones, his flesh stolen and worn out of shape. Eskel’s ears throb in time with the heartbeat that bellows with thick blood and the cold of baited death just before him. Eskel takes a step back, involuntary instinct preserving him. His silver sword weighs on his back.

Geralt grins, fanged teeth caked in black grime. He slumps into the nook he’s so clearly dug himself, laughing around a choking cough. It does not echo. The sound dies, drained and flat. Eskel hears it from miles away.

“Thought I heard - heard singing.” Geralt’s voice catches and rasps. He closes his eyes. “Fuck. Lost it. Lost it. Eskel’s here now, singing fucking - Jas’s beer songs.”

“M’here, Wolf.”

Geralt peels a yellow and red-worn eye open. Eskel takes a steadier step towards him, his Quen sinking over Geralt like hot glass. Geralt stiffens. The tendons of his throat bulge. The veins around his eyes throb to the surface, flashing sickly with bile blood before he seemingly dissolves, bones snatched free within him. He droops, first at the knees, then his back bows, and then Geralt is hitting the ground, breaking his fall on his ragged and dirty hands. He keeps going until his forehead presses into the dark grit of what he’s unearthed, what depth he’s claimed for his tomb.

Dug. Dug. He’s dug himself in here. Dig, doggy, dig. Buried alive. He would have been just like Amarda, neatly filling a hole all his own. He would have been perfect.

Eskel hits his knees beside Geralt, pulling the Witcher against his chest. Geralt grasps Eskel’s gambeson, dragging their weight together.

“Eskel?” Geralt asks in a rough voice, looking up at him with wide wild eyes. His eyes shake within his skull, rolling briefly before he, with great effort, strangles his panicking breath and forces himself steadier, heaving with the effort. He pants, short of breath; Eskel can hear the ragged swingstep of his heart in his chest.

“Yeah. Yeah, Wolf. It’s Eskel.”

Geralt closes his eyes tightly. “Please be real,” he whispers, achingly vulnerable. Eskel hitches a breath at the words. “Worse things could visit me in death. I should be grateful. I'm grateful.”

“Shit, Geralt,” Eskel laughs weakly, cupping that familiar stubbled jaw. “Put me in a cuter outfit for your dying moments. And a good bottle of Est Est in my hand.”

Geralt’s forehead hits his. He smells foul, of rot and buried things. “Why are - how are you here?”

“Little birdie sent me.”

“Jas?”

Hope leaps high in Geralt’s voice. He shakes his head. He scrambles at Eskel, bracing himself up by Eskel’s shoulders. “Fuck,” he swears, trying to get to his feet, knees wobbling, legs as shaky as a new colts. “Fuck, Eskel.”

He pushes from Eskel, back hitting the tight tunnel wall, slumping against it. “Axii. I had - I burned myself up holding an Axii on him.” Geralt shows off the scorched palm of one hand where he held the sign like a lifeline until it seared through the boiled leather, leaving his palm with red weeping sore, now filthy and scabbed with dirt.

“Felt him. Felt him fading from me. Every time he slept - kept track of the nights, when I’d feel him thrash in my head. Felt myself dragging him into this hell. He was going mad.”

Geralt looks to him for reassurance, brow turned down, face softened by his guilt and worry. Eskel pats his shoulder. Axii is a dangerous game, and no less dangerous to use on a lover than a snide merchant or a dagger-happy brawler.

“He’s alive. You kept him alive. The House gave up on him once it had you.”

Geralt nods jerkily, swallowing, leaning his cheek into the cold soil. He laughs bitterly to himself. “He didn’t want me to tie him up.”

“No, he sure didn’t.” Eskel gets to his feet slowly, forgoing asking permission and taking Geralt’s arm over his shoulder, bolstering his weight. Geralt grunts, leaning on him. “Listen now, Geralt, we got to get our asses out of here, Toussaint-sweet. Hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you. Heard your pretty voice.” Geralt makes a clumsy and exhaustion-drunken attempt at patting Eskel’s cheek, only manages to fumble at him before his forehead presses to Eskel’s temple. He huffs at Eskel’s neck, his ear, his hair. He shakes with relief. “You smell…good.”

Geral trails off. He doesn’t need to say anything else.

Eskel urges them back where they came, Geralt slurring along with Eskel to Jaskieir’s drinking song. Until Quen once again falls on Amarda.

The Witchers stop, stumbling with their toes nearly atop her.

“She comes with us,” Geralt grunts, bending down and picking her up, tottering with the weight of her in his arms. She spills over from him in stiff threads of dress and hair and limbs, and all the things that did not spill from her.

“Let me hold her,” Eskel offers, opening his arms up to take the body of the woman they could not save. They can do this much; bring her back into the light, to her family, to a grave. Too often that’s all they can do.

Silence hangs on them now. Eskel pinches Quen, burdened, Geralt listing against him, Amarda an iron weight. She’s unreasonably heavy, as if being pulled to the core of the world by bonds his arms cannot defeat. Geralt struggles with each step, breathing hard, battling forward, head planted low, shoulders hunched.

The dark does not lighten. The deep does not lessen. Quen pushes them onward to nothing. Geralt drains Eskel’s water skin. The thirst does not slacken. Amarda grows heavier. Geralt weaker. And Eskel more sure his eyes have gone blind with seeing only dirt.

Eskel wants to talk but he's not sure he can get the words out. If it's worth drying his tongue on them. The way Geralt’s breathing, like having his lungs is a godsdamned chore, Eskel's not sure anything he says will land in the Witcher's ear over the sound of his rattling. But still, he's got an armful of a dead woman, and their boots are scraping with every step and The House is swallowing them on a never ending tongue.

The Path is a lot of walking.

No one tells you that. None of the old Witcher’s ever warned about that. How your feet don't like to stand up outside of boots. How your toes hit the tip and curl. Man is, as any beast, made for a specific kind of survival. Walking. Endurance. Whole armies march their slow political parades of violence and consumption, in row after row of two foot trodding.

But there's no way the earth is this long under itself. No way that little square of light that smells like sun and sap could ever be as far away as it is, with nothing but darkness and silence around them like they're underwater at midnight, leagues below anything that breathes.

They're slowly drowning.

Eskel’s Quen flickers. The edges grow fuzzy. His hands are numb. Been numb. He's not sure he could put Amarda down if his life depended on it.

Geralt sags.

“C’mon Wolf,” Eskel grunts. “One foot in front of the other.”

Has Geralt slept? Was he able to meditate? Or has he just been digging himself deeper into this hell, cozying himself into his deathbed.

“Course you didn't sleep,” Eskel answers himself aloud with a shake of his head. “Held that Axii for a week, huh?”

Geralt grunts. Eskel whistles low.

“Shit. You gonna die on me before you can show off to Lambert?”

“You tell him for me.”

“Don’t have your flair for dramatics.”

He thinks the sound that comes out of Geralt is a laugh. “Take the pup with you. He'll do it.”

“Lambert would bite his head off. Keep,” Eskel has to catch his breath, running out of air too soon, labouring for it, “keep telling you that.”

Geralt’s panting. “How I remember it, I warned you.”

“Remind me when we're out of here.”

That's the last straw. Geralt's hand scrapes down the wall and he goes with it, bracing against the dirt and dragging down to his ass.

“Geralt,” Eskel snaps. His arms sag with the weight of Amarda’s corpse. “Get up.”

The quiet creeps in. Eskel can hear Geralt's heart still beating, the tired rise and fall of his lungs.

“Get up, Geralt.”

Geralt’s whole body moans with the effort of the push. The white haired Witcher pitches forward onto his knees, the tangle of his mane hiding his face, catching in his dirtied mouth.

“You...keep going. I'm tired,” Geralt tells him with solemn authority.

Eskel can't turn around. His neck prickles. If he turns around, he's not sure he'll be able to find the right way out again. Fear perches at the back of his mind, no, right behind his eyes, throbbing through the chords and nerves of his body. If he turns around, there will not be a way out. The dirt will come. The deep will deepen.

His Quen is failing and the dark is creeping.

“Wolf,” Eskel nearly begs, shifting around the cold corpse hanging from him.

“Wolf,” Geralt echoes. He grunts. He grunts and it catches on a low trembling note. Eskel’s eardrums swell. He swallows. The pressure pops.

He lets go of Quen, then Amarda’s body, and finally his resolve. He slides down to the tunnel floor.

“Eskel,” Geralt barks, firebrand spark back in him in an instant. Eskel smirks wearily, one fang peaked over his lips, but there's no way for Geralt to see the expression.

“If I'm gonna carry you out of here, I need a moment to rest. Get my strength back.”

There's a pregnant silence before he hears Geralt crawl the couple of feet separating them. His hearing is off, and his nose isn't working right. Geralt's far away, rustling, and then he's a hot heavy weight against him, all at once, dropped like a portalkey to his side.

“I'm too heavy to carry.”

“I've carried you before.”

“Not like this.”

“So it'll be the first.”

Geralt's lips find his in the dark. He tastes like a ghoul. Eskel lets him have it anyway, kissing Jaskier’s farewell into Geralt's mouth and taking one for himself in a greedy lick.

“Jaskier's gonna write me a ballad,” Eskel teases, resting his head against Geralt's. “In exchange for getting you out of here.”

Geralt grunts disapprovingly. “Shit deal you made. Ask for something useful, like coin.”

“Not a lover of the arts?”

“Jas is arts enough.”

“He said he’ll be good and quiet when you get out of here.”

Eskel closes his eyes at the warmth of Geralt’s huffing laugh. It's a good sound.

“This isn't as bad as I thought it'd go,” Eskel reasons after some time. He doesn't know how long of a time. He's not sure if his eyes are open or closed. Wouldn't make a difference.

“Hmm?” Geralt's curiosity is slow to rise. He's slowing. His heart sounds slower. Eskel doesn't know when it got so slow.

“If this is the end. You, me. Only one corpse.”

Geralt snorts weakly. “You're a stupid bastard.”

Eskel grins, but there's no way of knowing that either. His face could be doing anything in the dark. They could be anyone, anything. Geralt could be red-haired again, made boy again, full of unbroken promises. The dark wouldn’t tell. No one would know.

“Let me catch my strength. Can you meditate?”

He feels Geralt shake his head, their cheeks nearly rubbing. He feels, too, the reluctant surrender of Geralt’s head to his shoulder, the heavy breathing, the failing and surrendering.

“Wolf,” Eskel whispers, turning to press his mouth to Geralt’s filthy hair. “Rest a moment.”

Geralt hums.

“I'll carry you out.”

Another hum.

Eskel closes his eyes, if they were ever open, and it is all the same. He just needs a moment. Geralt needs a moment. Then they'll stand up. They'll keep walking. They'll find their way.

Not once has he seen an Igni mark. Not once did he smell the trail of himself. Wherever they are, it is nowhere, but they are there together, and that is something.

“Sorry,” Eskel whispers to Amarda, to the neverborn inside her, to Geralt.

And then the screaming.

Eskel jolts. He knocks his skull into Geralt’s nose, rousing the other Witcher.

Screaming. Blabbering and hooting. Clanging. Stomping and thumping.

It tumbles around the walls. It strikes the stones and bones within. Cacophonous discord fills the tunnel like smoke. Eskel rises with it, teeth grit. Geralt doesn't but Eskel can hear him growling low in his chest, the low thunder of his vibrations layering with the noise.

A squealing horn spits out above it all. A leatherskin drum. A lute. Both Witchers tip their ears, a certain voice among uncertain many flaying itself to be heard.

And through it all, a prick of light. A smell of maple smoke and baked apple.

Eskel holds the corpse tight and drags Geralt stumbling to his feet, shoving him forward. They don't speak, there are no words nor breath to spare. They hunt after that sound, baited by the chaos of it, the dissonance and the mess. The sheer vibrancy of what is and only can be people, without rhythms, without tune or melody or harmony, beating and yawping with senseless devotion to living and life and being known before the indifference of the impossible.

The square of light grows. The mouth of the House hangs open. The shape of the cellar doors solidifies. Eskel keeps hold of Geralt, a hold on Amarda’s body, and shoves them all three up and through until they rise, struggling, gasping, into the dusty and unremarkable blandness of The House.

In plain and vibrant color, the people of White Stone pound their chests, scream their breath, beat spoons on pots and axes against trees. Children race to and fro, screaming and shoving and giggling. Jaskier spins about, unwashed, unshaved, shed of a soiled doublet and sloppy with effort. But when the two Witchers and their unfortunate third break into the fresh of the world, the crowd quiets.

Jaskier and another man rip out towards them, fearless and frightened at once.

Heron Rotteram is younger than Eskel thought he'd be, but it's hard to tell beneath the haggard look of his face. He slows through the final stage of grief, having wept and wailed and begged - and this is all there is to give in comfort.

“Amarda,” he says, coming to Eskel, to her, throwing himself over the corpse and the Witcher in a wretched embrace. In the light, the smell of death hits himm. Eskel passes the man his deceased wife, all too ready to be free of the burden. He stands as regretful harbinger.

Beside him, Jaskier hugs Geralt desperately, cursing him lovingly, wetting the dried dirt on Geralt's face and neck with his beatific weeping.

For his part, Geralt endures the scene, resting his chin on Jaskier’s head, eyes closed, holding the bard loosely as the rest of him unwinds like a dropped spindle.

“Thank you, thank you, gods, thank you, Eskel,” Eskel hears Jaskier muttering into Geralt’s neck. Then the bard takes up his hand, lifting his face to commit the same overtures of gratitude onto him, hugging Eskel and kissing his cheeks and chin, attempting to rock him like a babe despite the great effort of the task.

The crowd returns to their noisemaking, swelling with it. The twin girls race up to latch onto Jaskier’s hips, peering eerily up at the Witchers.

“It worked?”

“It worked,” Jaskier confirms, dropping his hands to each other their heads, petting once the strip of the hair’s part where the braids pull to either side. “I’m a fucking genius!”

Jaskier breaks away with a whoop, lifting one of the girls beneath her armpits and spinning her. “Who’s a genius? Me. Master of the Seven Arts and Sciences. Ha! Ha! Oh, ho ho ho, I am just - right fucking brilliant. Strike me dead, gods, if you dare! I’ll defy you!”

Jaskier puts the girl down, picks the other up, does the same song and dance unto her, before grinning and beating a palm to his chest in tawdry salute. His heart beats hard, thud thudding. Geralt winces at the sound, swaying on his feet, knocking into Eskel.

“Shit,” Jaskier curses, at his side once more. “Geralt. You’re hellish. You’re death.” He brushes at the dirt on Geralt’s face. “Gods, darling, you’re half buried.”

Eskel shudders. His mind flashes to the sight of Geralt burrowing himself deeper into the earth, rooting himself a place to die and rot and feed the things above and below. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Jaskier echoes, looking up at Eskel.

Geralt nods, stone-eyed. “Buried.”

“Buried?” Jaskier cups his cheek, brushing at his clotted eyelashes. Then his eyes drift to Amarda, to the caked filth around her, the ruined state of her hands. Then to Geralt’s hands, the wound of them, the torn tips of his gloves. Jaskier pales even more, if possible. His mouth opens and he gags at the thought, throat croaking. “Melitele’s ripe cunt, Geralt - what horror? ”

Whatever either of them might have said, it’s fallen away when Heron Rotteran, kneeling with his wife’s body across his lap, begs for their attention.

“Witchers.”

Geralt stiffens, drawing up, trying not to look vulnerable in the face of so many people who haven’t been given a monster’s head. Eskel braces him subtly with his arm, offering Geralt purchase.

The rabble roused crowd quiets, sucking in a breath, White Stone at the ready.

“We’ve never had a body,” Heron says, just loud enough to be heard by the closest party. He pets his wife’s cheek, her bloated belly. “They leave us and never come back.”

The House waits, empty now, wanting again.

Jaskier swats at the prickle on the back of his neck and makes a frantic gesture at the crowd. A man with a pot and a spoon begins to clang once more, frantic and nonsensical. Eskel winces, rubbing at his ear.

“What is all this?” he asks, pawing at his face, scars aching.

“There’s a - a rhythm. A bloody awful rhythm. It catches you.” Jaskier shakes his head. “Let’s get the hell away from here. I want to vomit, my darlings.” He waves a hand before him, fed up, done, resolved to it, and drags both Witchers further from the threshold of The House, beating a retreat into the crowd.

Eskel turns to see two more men and a woman approach Heron where he cradles Amarda, taking the corpse from his weak hands.

Jaskier doesn’t vomit, but he makes a great show of bracing himself on a tree and swooning while Geralt holds himself up like he’s got a bleeding gut wound. Despite the raw ends of his nerves and the leaden quality of his blood, Quen overused and dragging him to a steadily growing need for a long meditation, Eskel stands in the best shape.

“The inn,” Jaskier manages, helping to take Geralt’s weight alongside Eskel. “I’ll explain. All will be well, dear Witchers.”

Explain he does as he cleans Geralt of the worst of the grime with tepid water and floral soap.

“I don’t understand it, but once I was free of the - that madness, it tickled at me. I barely remember anything but that humming - it bellowed. It breathed. It slowed. It had a pulse. I’m not sure, I’m still not, but some resonance ensnares. There’s science behind music, you know, it’s not all just me talking out of my ass.”

“Hmm.”

“Hush, you, none of that.”

“The girls - no one sang. I don’t think anyone really put it together but some part of them feared to sing, to slip that rhythm into speech. Women, mothers, whatever magic, whatever wretched temptation lures the prey, it lives in a song, a rhythm, a certain-” he taps his fingers on the wooden bath’s lip, “a cadence or pattern. It’s a living thing, whatever it is. I bet it lived in lullabies. In workman’s songs. I don’t know.”

“Singing us into its mouth,” Eskel murmurs. Fuck. “That isn’t a monster I know how to kill.”

“This town is doomed.”

“We can destroy The House. It’s a gateway, if it’s anything. Whatever it is beneath, we can’t kill it, can we?”

Geralt shakes his head. “But we can make it hard to reach.”

“I’ve advised,” Jaskier says in a delicate, threatening tone, “that people keep up their clamouring day and night, at all hours, until we’ve come to a conclusion. They’re terrified. They didn’t know. They couldn’t have understood. The House doesn’t burn. The stones don’t fall. They tried that. I don’t,” he shivers, “I don’t want to go near that House again. I want to be far from here, Geralt. Quickly.”

Geralt nods, as if he’s in any shape to do anything but have Jaskier wipe him clean. “Eskel and I will find what we need to bring it down.”

Jasker bandages Geralt’s palm where the Axii had burned blue so long. He kisses the bandage and then Geralt’s fingertips, one by one. “I owe you both a song.”

“A big ballad,” Eskel corrects.

“The biggest.”

“Let me sleep first,” Geralt demands tiredly, heaving himself towards the bed with great effort, spine curled up against his skin. “Before anymore singing is done.”

Jaskier touches his own throat, terror ghosting in his face. “I don’t care to sing anytime soon. I fear - it will want us all again.”

Geralt presses his face into the pillow with a groan. “I will worry after a nap. It can wait.”

And like that, Jaskier and Eskel watching his back, Geralt closes his eyes and sleeps, sharp and sudden and sound.

Jaskier puffs out a breath, sitting on the floor that’s wet with puddles of muddy water. Eskel sinks down beside him, shedding his swords, his stiff gambeson. Geralt takes up the whole bed, limp and relaxed, safe once more, as safe as he ever is.

“Fuck,” Jaskier whimpers, curling his knees to his chest, tottering himself into Eskel. Eskel accepts him readily, comforted by the smell of him, the swift human heart racing against the steady beat of his own. He wraps an arm around Jaskier and kisses the top of his head. Poor lad. He's had a time of it too. _“Eskel.”_

Nothing to do now but rest and recover. “How long was I down there?”

“Four days.”

Eskel buries his face into Jaskier’s wild hair.

“But you smell like it’s been a month,” Jaskier mutters, gasping for a breath around the bulk of Eskel’s embrace.

“Geralt smells worse.”

“He always smells.”

They hold each other tighter. Jaskier digs his nose into Eskel’s neck. “You mad Witchers. You’ll kill me one day. Both of you.”

“But not today, little one.”

“Not today.”

And when the floor grows too hard, and their bones protest, the two of them pile into the too small bed to lay against Geralt who wakes only long enough to roll atop Jaskier, to fit Eskel in around him. No one complains about the smell or the sweat, or the aches of contortion or numbing limbs. Jaskier works at the tangles in Geralt’s hair and pets the hair on Eskel’s arm, and neither hums nor sings for the first time Eskel can remember. But he does speak, well-worn poems of autumn festival, of turning leaves and golden harvest, poems of peace and gentle and of hands made kind.

Eskel closes his eyes and this time he knows that they are closed, for the warm firelight dances behind his lids with Jaskier’s ruby-lipped prose in his ear.

And when they open again, the day has passed, and Jaskier washed, and water and wine wait for him. Geralt’s awake, stretched out beside him, tasting red and hot when he kisses Eskel then makes a face at what he finds. No more buried kisses, just the taste of dirt.

“Wash up,” he grunts, pushing Eskel from the bed.

Jaskier, kneeling at the edge of the bed with Geralt’s feet in his lap and chamomile oil on his hands, tips his head to his coinpurse on the table.

“I doubt Maritha will make you pay. White Stone is grateful and awestruck by us all. But to be sure, get yourself a feast, Eskel, and a bath and the like, and come back to me so I may pay you mind.”

It’s easy to obey such a simple order.

Osland’s by the inn’s hearth, and the stableman greets him now with none of the previous hesitations. “Witcher.” He ushers Eskel to a seat, taking in his ragged form with a grimace. “Who knew you had it in you.”

Eskel grunts, mind catching up to being awake, to being in a room again with people bustling with the minutia of living. Distantly, yes, he can hear a small party keeping watch over The House, dispelling any order or peace that would worm into the ear and lay host to the mind.

Even still, Eskel rubs at his ears, shaking with the niggling sensation of paranoia. He wants to be far from here. Jaskier is right on that.

He eats his fill of potato cakes and caramel brown pumpkin and carrots, blistered by the fire. He drinks a jug of hot cider and, prompted and lead by Osland and a man named Hris, takes his tired body to a public bathhouse, no more than a large wooden building with a low ceiling he has to hunch under before he can sprawl on a bench and let steam overtake his weariness.

They want to know what lay beneath The House of White Stone.

“Elven bones? A mass grave?”

“Elven bones?” Eskel opens an eye to consider Hris’s earnest face. The man, made supplicant by his curiosity, has taken it upon himself to wash at Eskel’s fingernails. He’s young, perhaps enchanted by the sight of a Witcher, making up fairytales of heroes like a certain familiar someone. Eskel should be more on guard but - but the hands on him are gentle and alive and they make him want for the bed he will share soon.

“This is Gwynn Carraigh, beneath the shadow of Dol Blathanna. The land once split beneath an Elven city, the legends say.”

“Oi, yeah, legend says,” Osland snorts. He doesn’t try to touch Eskel but he does keep the steam plentiful, dribbling water over hissing hot rocks.

“Bones,” Eskel repeats. “Didn’t see any.”

“That’s what they say the white stone is here. Bones, boiled and baked together. Beaten to marble by time”

“Nobody says shit,” Osland deflects. “Listen, Witcher, nobody says shit. Nobody knows shit. But you and the White One and the loony bard, ey, you can say whatever you want now. Drug yourselves outta The House. Brought that poor woman too.”

She’d been so heavy. Her body hadn’t wanted to leave.

Eskel can feel his feet wanting to sink into the earth. He keeps them on the bench, toes curling nakedly. “Gonna get me a ballad.”

“A ballad?”

“Always wanted a ballad.”

“Well.” The two men shift uncomfortably. “Might be awhile before we’re singing it here.”

“Yeah,” Eskel agrees, looking at the wooden ceiling. Nothing warps, nothing bends. Clean sweat drips from his brow into the rivelets of his scars. “Don’t feel like singing.”

Fed, watered, cared for, Eskel returns to the scene of Jaskier kissing Geralt’s back, paying homage to the dimples at the base of his spine, to the cleft of his buttock and the shy skin of behind his knees.

“Bathhouse?” Jaskier guesses, sitting back from Geralt to sip wine. He’s shaved in Eskel’s absence, and tipped himself into a goblet once more. Geralt slits an eye open to sweep over him, grunts an approval, and makes a vague effort to shift sideways and offer up the bed. Eskel gets a knee up and collapses down with an ‘oomph’ that makes Geralt snort and press his face into his shoulder, rooting his face down into the crevice between Eskel and the pillow. It makes Eskel’s gut sink in memory of Geralt digging his own face into dirt, but Geralt doesn’t seem to think anything of the gesture as he burrows his face against Eskel’s skin. Jaskier only tuts, sitting astride Geralt’s hips, dressed in a sleeping shirt and nothing else.

“Apparently, this used to be the place of an Elven city.”

“Gwynn Carraigh,” Jaskier confirms. “Yeah. I think some things got left behind in the destruction. The mountains shook. The earth wrent. The rifts of the world swallowed the land up.” He digs the heel of his hands into Geralt’s back, earning a low moan of approval from the Witcher beneath him. “I remember it now. Didn’t put it together. White Stone. Should always remember to translate to Elder. The secrets of this world lie in the past.”

“They lie below,” Eskel murmurs, closing his eyes again, impossibly tired. The fire in the room crackles pleasantly, without time, without measure, spitting and burning all wild. His minds drifts to the Blue Mountains, to the veins that run through the earth, that bled into the roots of the herbs that became poison and potion and impossibility.

“Below?”

“Buried. The secrets are buried.”

Jaskier hand touches his chest, the wolf of his medallion asleep under his fingers. “Let’s not exhume what lies below.”

“Bones. It’s bones down there.”

Flecks of white. Not stone but bones. And worms and dirt and dark. Buried alive. One big grave. Eskel tangles his hands in the sheets.

“Let’s say a prayer for them and hurry our way out of here. Geralt, will you be strong enough to travel?” Jaskier shakes him gently. Geralt grunts something agreeable and it’s decided.

“We’ll do our best to ruin that House and White Stone will figure out the rest,” Geralt murmurs distantly, trying to focus on the remainder of the contract, the ends left loose.

“Rotteran will pay you,” Jaskier says, stroking Geralt’s brushed hair over his shoulders. “He’s happy to have a body to bury.”

“I know the feeling.” Eskel avoids Jaskier’s pitying look.

Geralt nips him gently on the arm and when Eskel rolls to find his face, he kisses Eskel, not with farewell flavoring his tongue but with the warm steady comfort of another day lived, snatched once more from the mouth of death. Geralt would not have been too heavy to carry. He is not too heavy now, sliding into Eskel’s arms. Eskel meets his embrace, holding tight, thinking, dreadfully, that it would not have been so bad to die in that dark beside him. Because now, the grave waits for them both once more, and it will surely be a lonely parting with the world. Fate will not be so kind twice.

“I said a prayer for you,” Eskel whispers to Geralt, kissing the curve of his ear. Geralt lifts his face to peer at him, amber eyes blazing like a royal forge. Geralt never bows his head to utterances of Witcher’s prayers. He believes in nothing and obeys no one, not king nor law, not destiny nor the dancing fates, not even the rules of Chaos or his own limitations. But he does obey decent manners, so he kisses Eskel’s cheeks in thanks and kisses the scalded remnant of Quen seared into his palm, the sign’s summoning shape scarred into the wrinkle of his lifeline.

Beneath Geralt’s heavy flesh and bones, Eskel settles down to listen to Jaskier begin to recite the first clumsy compositions of two bright eyed Witchers come home from the bottom of the world. It’s not quite true, it’s not quite right, but closing his eyes, he doesn’t mind the slant of it. Better yet, for now till forever, exists the song where they did not surrender.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> thank you to the people who cheered on a bit of spooky. what a difficult genre. hard to strike a balance between my love for banter and staying on task with mood. i tried to give some tenderness at the end....
> 
> and no. the thing beneath the house of gwyn carraigh is unconquerable. the best bet the lads have is to make it too hard for anyone to get inside....dont ask too many questions. the earth wants. the earth will take. it will swallow you whole.
> 
> eskelchopchop totally has a bit where eskel calls young geralt a fox-haired boy - wow we love a redhaired geralt lemme tell u - so thats the bit of inspiration for eskels song.
> 
> major song for inspiration : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsAq3QuxOW0  
> 


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